Skeleton Witch
by Elizabeth Shawnessey
Summary: Strange things are happening in Louisville, Kentucky, and even though Sam and Dean Winchester have been forbidden to hunt by their father, Sam is insistent they investigate. Set in season one between "Shadow" and "Hell House"; first in a series; long.
1. Prologue

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

PROLOGUE

Waverly Hill Sanitarium  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Sunday, June 18, 2006  
>7:45 PM<p>

**L**insey Price stared up at the large, windowless, _way _frightening façade of the Waverly Hill Sanitarium as it towered before her, trying to remember what had lead up to this moment.

Earlier, she had been awoken by her best friend Terri Sanders, ready to chop her head off. It was the first month of summer vacation and Linsey was trying to go for the world record of sleeping in before school started back up again in August. So far, the latest she had stayed in bed had been three in the afternoon. The night before Terri had interrupted her slumber, Linsey had had a good feeling that Sunday was going to be the day she made it past five. Unfortunately, her best friend of ten years had deterred her goal by jolting her awake that afternoon.

"Get up! I have an idea!" Terri had shouted, shaking Linsey violently, her blonde hair slipping into her sleepy blue eyes.

"What now?" Linsey groaned, tossing a pillow over her face and hoping Terri would get the hint.

She didn't. Or, if she had, Terri had definitely ignored it. "You know that old insane asylum on Page's Lane that no one's been to in like, a hundred years?"

"It's an old hospital, and yes."

Linsey tossed the pillow away to see Terri push a tuft of brown hair behind her ear before continuing. "Yeah, whatever. Anyway, Greg, that annoying kid we had biology with last year, told me that they unlocked the gates like, a few days ago and people are daring each other to stay the night. Not like anyone's going to _actually_ do it, right?"

"What're you getting at?" Linsey asked, propping herself up on one elbow and using her free hand to rub her eyes.

"What if we, you know, did what everyone's talking about doing? You know… stay overnight in the sanitation?"

"Okay, first of all: it's a _sanitarium_. Secondly, no way in Hell."

As if to put finality behind her already serious tone, Linsey threw back the blankets and got to her feet. The hardwood floor was warm and inviting, heated by the sun spilling in through the open bay window that illuminated her bedroom. Looking out it, she silently wondered how she could have slept through such bright sunlight.

"Will you at least _think_ about it?" Terri pleaded. "C'mon! We can invite Sarah. Safety in numbers, right?"

Groaning in response, Linsey continued staring out the window. She knew Sarah would be just as against the idea of going to the Waverly Hill Sanitarium as she was, but would probably fold under the pressure of Terri pestering her just like she was with Linsey now.

Sarah Kyle was a new friend. Linsey and Terri had met her last semester in a Bible as Literature class at Central High School. She was exactly the type of friend Linsey's mom approved of: meek, devout, and studious—everything Terri Sanders wasn't. Also unlike Terri, Sarah wasn't the type of girl that would attempt to stay overnight in a clearly-haunted hospital. For a moment, Linsey appreciated the type of friend her mom was head-over-heels for.

But the moment passed a few seconds later when she remembered that Sarah wasn't exactly strong-willed. Linsey had quickly learned that the girl had a problem saying no, and knew her decision would be the deciding factor in this Waverly Hills thing. Knowing this, Linsey turned around to face Terri. "When?"

Terri smiled. "Tonight."

Now they stood outside of the abandoned hospital, Sarah's blue Subaru parked behind Linsey and becoming blacker in the fading light of day. The sanitarium was also darkening. As imposing as the five-story, wide-winged building was during the daytime, it was becoming something much more at twilight—something that silently screamed at her to get back in the car and drive away.

To her left, a flashlight clicked on, illuminating Terri's pointed face in a ghostly shadow as she held the beam beneath her chin. "Welcome… to the scariest place on Earth!"

Cracking a grin at her friend's overly-theatrical antics, Linsey rolled her eyes. "This is stupid." Then turning to glance around, the grin faded into a frown. "Where's Sarah?"

Terri held the flashlight to her chin again and raised her free hand toward the sky in a dramatic gesture. "She has been captured by the spirits!"

Linsey shot her best friend a look. "You can stop at any time."

Looking crestfallen, Terri lowered the flashlight and pointed toward the Subaru's open trunk with the beam. "She's praying."

"Oh," was all Linsey said, not sure whether to roll her eyes or commend her friend for doing so before entering a building with such a shady past.

They all knew the legend of Waverly Hill. As Louisville natives, they had grown up hearing its thousand different renditions of what had happened inside the hospital's now-decayed walls. One story, the one most rooted in fact, said that the place had been used as a treatment facility for patients with tuberculosis in the early twentieth century. Another, more wild, story claimed the sanitarium had been used to experiment on the mentally insane during the 1920s. But no matter what version was told, the tales always shared the same element: people had died horrible deaths inside and continued to haunt the place long after they were gone. And a place like that was not somewhere Linsey wanted to walk into.

But it wasn't like she had a choice. She had agreed to come if Sarah said yes, which she inevitably had, and now Linsey was stuck here with no ride home if things got too hairy for her. Her parents were out of town, and there was no way she was calling them in Baltimore to let them know she was at Waverly Hill with Terri Sanders and that they should come home to pick her up. They already weren't fond of their daughter's best friend, there was no reason to make it worse by letting them know she had been convinced to go to the place they had deemed "off limits" since she had been old enough to walk.

So she had to stick it out. Hopefully it would be uneventful and Terri would get bored enough to want to go home.

_Hopefully_.

"Hey, chickens! You comin' or what?"

Linsey snapped out of her thoughts to see that Terri and her flashlight were making their way to what she was sure had once been the front entrance. The doors were missing, but it was the only opening that reached the floor inside the three side-by-side arches making up the entryway.

Rolling her eyes, Linsey shot a glance at Sarah as the timid blonde shut the trunk of her car and the two followed Terri inside.

* * *

><p>The first floor of the building hadn't been that bad, but Linsey owed most of that to the fact that they had gone straight from the front entrance to the stairs to the second floor.<p>

The inside of Waverly Hill was just as decayed as its outside. Where the façade was nothing but rust and steel, the inside was graffiti and rubble. Most of the walls were spray painted over or missing altogether, and a majority of the floor was cracked, peeling, and littered in debris. As she looked around at the hospital with the glow of her flashlight beam, she had a hard time imagining the place up and running. It felt like the building had always been a cold, rotten fixture at the top of one of the highest points of Louisville.

The second floor seemed, if possible, worse than the one below. Pieces of the walls looked as though they had been knocked out with a sledgehammer, and doors hung as if held to the frame by fishing wire. The hallway stretched out uninvitingly in front of them as they stood at the mouth of it, all three girls contemplating whether they should try to make it to the other side or stay where they were. Even Terri didn't seem as sure of herself as she had outside, growing quieter the longer they were in the building.

"Maybe we should go," Linsey suggested, turning to her friends.

"Yeah, alright," Terri agreed. "I just want to check out one thing. I doubt the rest of this place is as exciting as the body chute."

"Come again?" Sarah piped up in her squeaky voice, clutching her flashlight.

"Yeah. They used to toss dead bodies down this slope thing. I want to see it."

Terri's enthusiasm seemed to be coming back as she spoke, giving Linsey an odd feeling. She didn't want an over-excited Terri leading them into the depths of the hospital.

As soon as they had walked inside Waverly Hill, the screaming voice telling her to turn back had become a roar. Wind, from virtually nowhere, had blasted through them the minute they had entered the sanitarium. Linsey had pivoted to go back to the car, but Terri had grabbed her wrist before she was able to take a step in the opposite direction. It was what had caused them to go straight from the first floor to the second, probably because Terri was under the impression Linsey wouldn't try to make a run for it if they were thirty feet above ground. Linsey, the longer she stood there, wasn't so sure.

"I'm not going some place with 'body chute' in the name," Linsey objected, backing away from Terri before her friend could grab her wrist and drag her elsewhere. "Besides, it's just some tunnel. Nothing exciting about that."

"You can't _honestly_ tell me you find that boring," Terri grinned.

"That's exactly what I'm telling you. You go look at it and tell me how a cement slide can be considered exciting. I'll be in the car," Linsey said, pushing past Terri and Sarah and heading for the stairs.

"Whatever!" Terri laughed, following Linsey down. "You're just scared!"

Stopping at the landing, Linsey whipped around to look at her friends on the steps above her. Crossing her arms, she rolled her eyes. "I'm not scared. I'm just not stupid."

"So it's _stupid _to look at an empty tunnel that's not going to hurt you?"

"Yes!"

"I don't think it's stupid," Sarah piped up, fiddling shyly with the bottom of her flashlight as she spoke quietly. "I think it's kinda cool."

Terri turned and gave Sarah a large smile, then looked at Linsey. "See? Not stupid."

"Fine. Whatever," Linsey snapped. "Which way?"

Terri smiled again before jumping the remaining three steps to the floor and leading the way to the "body chute". Taking a sharp left, the three girls passed the front door and headed deeper into the main atrium. Linsey held her flashlight up to read the crumbling letters above a large, expansive archway with filthy swinging doors: MORGUE.

"You've got to be kidding me," she groaned.

No one replied, but Linsey could imagine Terri grinning.

Crossing the threshold, Terri lead the way inside. Two gurneys sat in front of them in the otherwise empty room, one leaning down toward the floor as if someone had sat on it and it had collapsed under their weight. To the right was what had surely once been the entrance to the autopsy room, but was now a cobwebbed doorway. Shining her light inside, Linsey saw more gurneys—these jutting out of the wall—as well as a chair that held a metal tray in its seat.

Suddenly, as if pushed by an invisible hand, the chair toppled over, the tray clattering to the ground.

All three girls jumped in surprise, with Terri accidentally colliding with the down-facing gurney. "Ouch!"

Linsey pointed her flashlight beam over to her friend to see that Terri's arm was now bleeding profusely from her elbow to her wrist and leaking onto the floor. Ignoring the pain for a minute, Terri reached out to remove a rusted scalpel that looked as if it had been jammed into the side of the tabletop.

"Okay. That's it. We're going. You're going to need like, five tetanus shots now," Linsey said, removing her cardigan and wrapping it around Terri's bleeding arm.

"Give me a minute," Terri said, pushing Linsey's sweater closer to the wound. "We're almost there."

Sarah frowned. "Maybe she's right."

Ignoring her, Terri made her way to the opposite side of the autopsy room and pointed her flashlight down a gaping hole in the wall. On one side, a steep slope lead endlessly down what was sure to be the other side of the hill behind the sanitarium, while a set of stairs lead in the same direction down the other half of the tunnel.

Taking a step inside it, Terri held her flashlight higher, as if to try to illuminate more of the chute. As she did so, however, the beam began to blink in and out. "I think the batteries are dying."

"Another sign that we need to _go_," Linsey said pointedly, crossing her arms over her chest and raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, okay," Terri agreed just as the flashlight finally gave out.

Turning to rejoin her friends in the center of the room, a sudden cold breeze wafted inside from the tunnel, kicking up dust. Terri, Linsey, and Sarah stood frozen in place.

"Weird," Sarah said.

"Yeah, tell—" but Terri was cut off mid-sentence as a hand appeared from nowhere and clamped itself over the girl's mouth.

Linsey jumped forward to pull her friend free of the bodiless hand, but it was too late. The minute she put one foot forward, the hand tugged Terri backward into the body chute. Another second and Terri was on her back, the sound of her skull colliding with the concrete floor echoing in a sickening crack.

"Terri!" Linsey shouted, not daring to take another step unless she had to.

"Linsey, help! Something's got me!"

Sarah fell back as Linsey darted forward. As her hands were about to clasp around Terri's, her friend was dragged farther down the slope. "Linsey!"

Heading down the steps, Linsey pulled her flashlight from where it was stowed beneath her arm and pointed the flickering beam toward Terri. At her friend's feet stood a woman with long, scraggly hair and wild red eyes dressed in a tattered nurse's outfit that looked like it belonged in a 1930's flashback film.

The woman growled angrily at the light being shone in her face and pulled sharply at Terri again. As she did so, Linsey's flashlight burned out, engulfing her in total blackness. A second later, the sound of dragging came, followed by a distant, "LIIIIINNNSEEEEYYYY!"

After a few moments, the flashlight in Linsey's hand popped back on, but the tunnel surrounding her was completely empty.

"Terri?"


	2. Chapter One

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

ONE

Mel's Diner  
>Fort Wayne, Indiana<br>Monday, June 19, 2006  
>7:13 AM<p>

**P**lates, silverware, and glasses clattered together over the loud Southern Rock playing from the jukebox at Mel's Diner in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Sam Winchester sat alone at a table, a cup of coffee and a stack of books resting beside the laptop in front of him. It had been another restless night for Sam, who had been sitting in the diner since 5:45 that morning, but he wasn't about to let his insomnia prevent his older brother, Dean, from sleeping. Dean had other things on his mind, things that Sam kept on the back-burner, and needed his rest.

Sam and Dean Winchester had been on the road together for the past eight months, going from town to town working odd jobs that nobody, and that meant _nobody_,wanted: killing demons, exorcising poltergeists, and even fighting off Pagan gods. It was a job they had learned from their Dad, John, who had up and disappeared one night while Sam was away at Stanford and Dean was on a hunt of his own in New Orleans. They had recently connected with him, only to separate again, on their last job in Chicago. It was the last they had heard of him—well, almost the last.

Sam knew Dad was in hiding and had called Dean to advise the same, but it had been a month since then and he was growing tired of sitting in a motel room with nothing to do. If he couldn't go back to school, then he was definitely going to hunt. It gave him something to keep his mind off of Jess.

_Jess…_

A year ago, Sam wouldn't have even considered rejoining Dean in what they both referred to as "the family business." The life he had wanted since he was a kid was at his fingertips: Stanford, safety, stability. He had been living with his girlfriend, had a group of friends, and was on the fast track to becoming a lawyer when everything came crashing down on Halloween night. Dean had stumbled into his living room to tell him that Dad was "on a hunting trip and hadn't been home in a few days", then asked his younger brother to leave the comfort of the apartment Sam had shared with Jessica to try to track down their father. He had gone, grudgingly, only to be disappointed in what they found: No Dad, just an abandoned case.

After picking up where Dad had left off with a Woman in White haunting a stretch of road in Jericho, California, Sam had demanded that Dean take him back to Stanford. It was only a few minutes after walking through the door before Sam's life made a complete one-eighty. Pinned to the ceiling above the bed they had shared together was Jessica, her stomach bleeding and an expression of complete terror frozen on her face. Only moments after noticing her did the apartment catch fire, and everything that had once been theirs was destroyed. No trace of Sam Winchester or Jessica Moore was left behind.

Since then, Sam had had nightmares, night after night, of Jessica's death. It always began and ended the same: Sam lying in bed staring at the ceiling, only to realize that his girlfriend hung above him, her voice calling out to him. Then the fire came, and Sam awoke in a cold sweat. After awhile, he had learned that it was better to go without sleep than to shut his eyes and replay the death of the one person he had loved more than life itself. Dean had caught onto his brother's restlessness, but after Sam had explained the situation, his older brother had remained worried but silent. They had more pressing matters at hand. Like demons. And Dad. The latter being the thing that kept his brother up at night.

As if on cue, the door to the diner swung open to reveal Dean standing in the threshold. His light brown hair lay unusually flat on his forehead as he adjusted the collar on his brown-and-pewter leather jacket, his hard green eyes sweeping the diner. When he spotted Sam, he nodded toward his brother and beelined for him. The closer Dean got, the more Sam could see the dark circles under his older brother's eyes.

"Sleep well?" Sam frowned, looking back down at the computer screen.

"No," Dean scowled as he sat across from him. "It was like sleeping in an ice box. The damn air conditioner kept turning on and I couldn't fix it. Where were you all night?"

Before Sam could answer, however, a pretty, petite, blonde waitress came to their table and looked expectantly at Dean. "What'll you have?"

"Coffee, black. Thanks."

Sam watched the waitress walk behind the counter and smirked to himself. "You must've had a bad night's sleep. You didn't even try to ask for her phone number."

"Yeah, yeah," Dean rolled his eyes. "Anyway, I asked you a question. Where were you? It would would've been nice to not be the only one freezing my ass off in there."

Sam frowned and shrugged. "I drove around all night."

At this, Dean groaned. "I hope you remembered to fill up the tank."

"Why? It's not like we're going anywhere."

"Because, Sam, it's the principle of the thing. You borrow a man's wheels, you fill up the gas tank. How many times do I have to tell you—" Dean stopped talking as a grin broke out on Sam's face. "Man…"

"Relax, Dean. I put gas in the Impala. I'm not an idiot."

"Yeah, well, you could've fooled me."

Sam rolled his eyes at his brother's jab as the waitress returned with Dean's coffee. When she had walked away, the two of them sat in silence while Dean picked up one of the books off the pile in front of Sam. Glancing at the cover, Sam saw that it was Dad's old, leather-bound journal, which he had been looking through hours before, attempting to find some sort of reoccurring curse or ghost or _something _to hunt. Sadly, he had been disappointed and had resorted to his trusty laptop to point him in the right direction.

"Are you working on something?" Dean asked as he flipped absently through the book they had both nearly memorized since acquiring it.

Dad's journal was the one thing that had lead them on the right path to tracking down their father. He had left it behind in a motel room in Jericho with coordinates pointing to where he would be next. Unfortunately, when they arrived at where they pointed—Black Water Ridge, Colorado—they had found nothing but another awaiting case. Since then, they had used the knowledge Dad had gathered from his first days of hunting as reference. Anything that went bump in the night was likely to have been written, scribbled, or doodled inside the tattered book.

"Not anything specific," Sam said slowly, hoping that Dean wouldn't jump down his throat like he expected his brother to.

Ultimately, though, he wasn't that lucky. "Sammy, you _know _we're just supposed to sit tight until Dad gives us the go-ahead to start hunting again."

"Dean, I can't just sit here and do nothing."

"Yeah, well, you're gonna have to."

Sighing and shaking his head, Sam began to click around on the computer, taking comfort in the fact that Dean was on the other side of the booth and couldn't see what his disobedient younger brother was looking at. His Firefox browser took up most of the screen, with tabs such as _The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette_, the local police blotter, and other news websites open for him to switch between. So far, he had found nothing that seemed like their type of case, but he was determined to keep looking—with or without Dean's permission.

Refreshing the _Gazette_'s homepage, a new title appeared under the Top Stories section of the site. Clicking on the "Read More" link under the title of Strange Death In A Sanitarium, he was redirected to a picture of what looked like an abandoned building with rust coating the outside. Scrolling down, he saw the article that accompanied it:

**Louisville, KY** - The much-popularized Waverly Hill Sanitarium has claimed another victim, Louisville police confirmed Sunday night.

Linsey Price, 17, and Sarah Kyle, 18, were arrested outside of the abandoned hospital around 9 P.M. on charges of murder after a hysterical phone call to a 911 dispatcher was placed.

The two friends, both students of Central High School, told deputies that a ghost had murdered longtime classmate Terri Sanders, 17, although a body for the victim has yet to be retrieved.

Price and Kyle were taken in for questioning early this morning and have not been released.

"I think I've got something," Sam muttered, despite Dean's attitude.

"Great. Send it over to Caleb. He'll check it out."

At this, Sam glared at his brother over the top of the computer screen. "Why? It's only a few hundred miles from here. It'd take Caleb almost a day to get there from Lincoln."

"Alright. Humor me, College Boy: what have you found that we need to defy Dad's orders for, huh?" Dean retorted, meeting his younger brother's gaze. Turning the computer around, Sam pushed his laptop toward Dean and waited for his brother to read the article. When he was done, Dean looked up and frowned. "So?"

"So?" Sam snapped a little too loudly, taking his computer back from Dean. "There's a whole page in Dad's journal on this place! You know it as well as I do. If something's up with the Waverly Hill Sanitarium, we need to check it out."

"Just sounds like a couple of _Heathers_ trying to get out of a murder charge to me."

Rolling his eyes, Sam slammed the laptop closed and began packing up his belongings. Noticing what his brother was doing, Dean shut Dad's journal and shoved it into the lining of his jacket. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Louisville."

"No, you're not, Sam. Dad gave us an order."

"Yeah, well, Dad isn't here. He's not going to know the difference if we take a case or stay in a motel room all day. The thing at the sanitarium is worth checking out and you know it. So either you take me there or I hitch a ride; up to you."

Sighing in resignation, Dean picked up Sam's books and pulled his wallet out of his pocket to toss a five dollar bill on the table before standing up. "You wanna go? We'll go."

Raising an eyebrow at his brother, Sam threw his laptop bag over his shoulder and watched as Dean lead the way out of the diner in a huff. It wasn't often that Dean disobeyed Dad, but something Sam said must have struck a nerve with his older brother.


	3. Chapter Two

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

TWO

Louisville Sheriff's Station  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Monday, June 19, 2006  
>11:56 AM<p>

**S**heriff Jerry Dyer really hated his job at the police station. Not only were the hours long, the coffee bad, and his colleagues all men, but they sometimes got the occasional visit from the Feds. Today, a pair of young-looking agents had stepped into his placid precinct dressed in the usual suit and tie, flashing their badges, and proceeding to question the officer behind the front desk.

Jerry had to laugh at his co-worker's predicament, despite himself. Most likely, the Feds were here about the case down at the sanitarium—if it was a case at all—and they had picked the guy with the least amount of knowledge to question. Officer David Brennan was about the dumbest guy to graduate the academy, and Jerry had seen some idiots in his time. Brennan had been assigned to desk duty in his first month on the job due to his firearm going off inside the holster. He had been given leave for a couple of weeks until his foot healed from the blast, then dutifully took up residence in the front of the office.

Taking a long sip of what the guys called "mud coffee", Jerry sat back in his chair to enjoy watching Brennan squeal under pressure. The two agents were tall and looked to be about mid-twenties, but only one of them appeared intimidating. The taller of the two had soft, unassuming features and eyes that seemed to drink in every word Brennan sputtered out—which was unusual, to say the least. They both had brown hair and green eyes, with athletic builds beneath their suits and an air about them that oozed professionalism and wanting to get the job done—something that wasn't often seen inside the Louisville SD.

Jerry smirked to himself. He wished his men possessed that quality. They were all two steps away from Neanderthals.

The door to his office was closed, so he couldn't hear what the two were asking, but judging by the frustrated expressions that were deepening into the men's brows, Jerry could only assume that they were growing tired of Brennan's stammering as most did. After a minute, he saw the officer gesture to his door and the two agents nod in thanks before making their way to the glass separating Jerry from the rest of the precinct.

"Sheriff Dyer?" the taller of the two asked, opening the door slowly and hanging in the archway.

"Yes, sir. Come in, come in. Take a seat," Jerry offered genially, despite his usual dislike of federal agents—or, well, anything involving his job. "D'you want some coffee?"

"No, thank you," the shorter one declined in a surprisingly deep voice, taking a seat in one of the two chairs across from the sheriff. His partner did the same just as the speaker flashed his badge. "I'm Special Agent Scott, and this is Special Agent Young. We're here about the murder of Terri Sanders."

_Ding, ding, ding!_

"Yes, of course. What about it?"

This time it was Special Agent Young who spoke. His voice was softer than his partner's, but still deep. It was befitting of them both, giving them a rugged good-cop, bad-cop dynamic. "What can you tell us about it?"

"Not much to say," Jerry frowned. "We got a call here around nine o'clock from a couple of girls who were beyond hysterics, claiming their friend had been attacked by a woman down at the sanitarium. My men went to check it out and didn't find much except for a blood stain in the concrete of what had once been the morgue. We took a sample to see if it was a DNA match for Ms. Sanders, but we're still waiting on that."

"But you don't think anything actually went on there?" Agent Scott asked, his tone sounding pointedly skeptical as he shot a glance at his partner. "Just a couple of kids trying to raise a little Hell?"

"Well, without a body and without a call back from her parents to see if she's actually missing, I'm more inclined to think so. Sure, there's the bloodstain, but that could be from anything—a cut, accidentally tripping, etcetera. I don't see any signs of struggle that would point to foul play," Jerry sighed, grimacing. "Then there's the story the two girls are trying to feed me."

"Which is?" Agent Young asked.

"The two claim they saw a ghost murder their friend. I mean, there are local legends, but they're just _legends_. There isn't a homicidal spirit living inside of Waverly Hill. That's just nonsense. Besides, that place has been empty for years."

Agent Scott shot another pointed glance at his partner before leaning back in his chair. "So this whole thing can just be a waste of federal tax dollars?"

"I don't see anything that would suggest otherwise."

Agent Young frowned and bit his lip, obviously deep in thought. Jerry hated when Feds got that look on their face. It meant they were about to come up with something that would further waste his time. "What can you tell me about the sanitarium?"

It took all of Jerry's willpower not to roll his eyes at the question. Had the agent asked anyone else in town, they would have gladly divulged the history of the hospital, but he wasn't a historian, he was the sheriff.

Deciding to humor them, he took a long sip of coffee and attempted to recall the chapter on the place he had read in one of his wife's many _Haunted History _books that she kept laying around the house. If Melissa didn't teach the American Hauntings class at University of Louisville, he would have thought her interest in all that "ghost stuff", as he liked to call it, was weird rather than academic.

"What would you like to know?" he asked, hoping to stall.

Agent Young frowned. "Anything you can think of, even if it doesn't seem important. Like, would there be anything that would point to supernatural activity?"

Jerry couldn't help but bark a laugh. For Feds, they sure did keep an open mind. "There could be. I mean, there have been previous sightings of ghosts inside the hospital, but none that really sound like anything you wouldn't find in one of those Halloween TV specials. No one's ever called us on the place before, I can tell you that."

Taking a deep breath, Jerry looked at the agents expectant stares and leaned forward in his chair to rest his elbows on the desk, rolling his eyes. "The land that is today known as Waverly Hill Sanitarium was bought by Major Thomas H. Hayes in 1883 on which they build the Hayes family home. Since the place was removed, in those days, from anything in town, Mr. Hayes decided to open a school for his daughters to attend. He built a one-room schoolhouse on Page's Lane and hired a teacher named Lizzie Lee Harris. Due to Ms. Harris's liking for those Walter Scott Waverly novels, she named the school Waverly Hill. Major Hayes liked the name so much that he called his property that, too.

"By the time Major Hayes died in the early twentieth century, this whole area was severely stricken with an epidemic of tuberculosis. The plague was brought on by surrounding swamp land, which seemed to incubate the virus. To try to contain the disease from further outbreak, city hall knocked down Major Hayes's home and the school, then built a two-story sanitarium where they once stood.

"In 1924, the hospital was becoming crowded, so they began construction on the five-story building that's standing today, which was completed toward the end of 1926. It housed nearly four hundred patients, plus staff, and a rather large morgue—which was much need considering the rate the patients were dying.

"Treatment for tuberculosis was primitive at the time. Without antibiotics, natural cures were used with little result. When nothing subtle like sleep, sun, and fresh air did the trick, the doctors inside Waverly began extreme treatments that would be deemed unethical in this day and age: manually deflating lungs, removing ribs, and so on. The dire experiments caused more harm than help, and wound up killing patients at a faster rate than if the disease had done so alone.

"By the time the cure was discovered in 1943, it's estimated that nearly 64,000 people died inside of Waverly Hill Sanitarium—ten thousand dying in the first three years alone. Eventually the hospital was closed in 1961, then reopened a year later as Woodhaven Geriatrics Hospital, but that was closed in 1982 due to patient abuse.

"Aside from the deaths of the patients, a few of the workers had bit the bullet there, too. One of them was said to be the head nurse of Waverly, who hung herself in one of the rooms on the top floor when she found out she was pregnant. Another employee is said to have jumped out a window on that same floor, but that was never confirmed. The death toll for that place now is, if calculated correctly, somewhere up around 70,000."

Jerry took a long sip of coffee to keep his throat from drying out after the monologue while Agent Scott sat back in his chair. "Damn."

"Tell me about it," Agent Young agreed. "So, it's just been sitting there since 1982?"

"Yes and no," Jerry sighed, not wanting to pursue the topic any longer, but deciding to continue on to satisfy the agent's expectant stare. "The place has been auctioned off and there've been some buyers, but none of them seem to hold onto it for long. Every time someone snatches it up, they have some wild idea to bring it back to life, but it never happens. The most 'construction' that's ever been done on the place since '82 has been when a bunch of teenagers smashed all the windows out a couple of years ago. We locked it up and installed some security cameras since then. But no one was able to get in until last night, and that was only because we had to open it up since it's being sold by the state at the end of the month and prospective buyers want the chance to give it a good once-over before making a bid."

This seemed to spark both agents' attention. As the two exchanged a meaningful look and Agent Young frowned, Agent Scott spoke. "You have cameras?" His eyes narrowed, as if annoyed at the idea that he had sat there for so long without some kind of video interlude. "Do you have footage from last night?"

A laugh escaped Jerry before he could stop himself. "The cameras are _fakes_, boys. You seriously think we'd waste valuable money on _that_? Might as well spend it on a round-trip to Reno for the precinct. It'd be more efficient. Hell, I know I'd like a paid vacation."

Agent Scott pulled on his earlobe and scowled. Obviously what Jerry had said wasn't what the Fed wanted to hear, but Jerry didn't care. He was right. The money they would have spent on cameras, video tape, and transmitters would be worth about as much as twelve plane tickets and a night in a no-tell motel. Given the choice of the two, Jerry would definitely choose the latter. It would be a waste to record an empty sanitarium that no one ever visited. Even the more gutsy of teenagers were stopped by the chains around the entrance and the sign that told them the place was under video surveillance.

Standing up, Agent Young shook Jerry's hand and turned to leave, muttering his thanks. The other did the same and followed his partner out. Watching them go, Jerry sighed and shook his head. It looked like, as always, the Feds got the information they wanted but didn't approve of. It would only be a matter of a few more hour's investigation before they were back on a plane to Washington or wherever they were from.

Sitting back in his chair, Jerry drained the rest of his "mud coffee" and placed his feet on the desk. _Feds_.

* * *

><p>Sam followed Dean out of the Louisville Sheriff's Station and headed toward the Impala, pulling on his tie. It was too warm to be wearing a suit, but they had to at least look the part if they were hoping to get any information out of the sheriff. Unfortunately, they had learned more from the sputtering deputy behind the desk than anyone else inside, who had told them that Linsey Price and Sarah Kyle had been released on bail only hours before they had arrived in town.<p>

"That guy was like a walking textbook," Dean commented as he opened the driver's side door. "He was monotoning worse than you whenever you start rambling on about lore or whatever."

"Thanks," Sam replied, rolling his eyes. "Whatever. At least what he was saying checks out with what's in the papers and what's written about the place in Dad's journal."

"Yeah, but that doesn't tell us much. People died in a hospital from a _disease_, Sam. Doesn't exactly sound like anything that would piss a spirit off enough to start killing people. Maybe these girls are just yanking the sheriff's chain and making the whole thing up. Wouldn't be the first time that's ever happened."

"I don't think so," Sam frowned. "Just trust me on this, alright?"

Dean seemed at war with himself as he looked at Sam over the roof of the car. Sam knew his brother was still debating whether or not leaving Fort Wayne had been a good idea, made worse by the fact that he wasn't the only one doubting whether this case was legitimate. Though his brother never really agreed with the police, the fact that Sheriff Dyer was backing up his theory that there might not be anything to investigate was definitely weighing on Dean.

In an attempt to appease his brother, Sam sighed and tapped his fingers against the hot metal of the Impala. "Look, just give me a couple of hours, alright? There's definitely something here."

"Alright," Dean nodded. "Okay, so say we have a spirit… why's it suddenly attacking people? It just decided today would be the day it rose up from the grave to kill someone? That isn't the typical M.O. of your everyday ghost."

"Well, we need more information on the place, the patients, whether something like this has ever happened before," Sam sighed, not really wanting to spend more time behind the computer screen, even if it meant convincing Dean that something really _was _going on here. He had been sitting since close to six in the morning, at first in the diner, then in the car for the four hour drive from Fort Wayne to Louisville.

Dean shot his brother a look, a sudden knowing smirk on his face. "You sound jazzed about that."

"Not really," Sam admitted.

"Well, then, I have another idea."

"What? Go back to Indiana?"

"No. C'mon, man. You want me to throw you a bone, so I'm throwing you one," Dean said. "Let's go check out the hospital for ourselves."

Sam nodded, glad that his brother was being helpful to his cause rather than hurtful. "That actually sounds like a good idea."

"I'm full of them."

"Full of something, anyway."

Rolling his eyes, Dean got behind the wheel and started the engine. As the Impala roared to life, Sam got into the passenger's seat and Dean was off before he could slam the door shut, with the sounds of the Lynyrd Skynyrd tape Sam had been forced to endure all the way to Kentucky blasting through the speakers.


	4. Chapter Three

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

THREE

Waverly Hill Sanitarium  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Monday, June 19, 2006  
>1:47 PM<p>

**T**he Waverly Hill Sanitarium had been easy enough to find, even without Sam's Mapquested directions. Taking Page's Lane, Dean had coasted down the barren street until he came upon a gate that had been swung wide, situated between two brick columns hidden behind layers of overgrown foliage.

On the way up the driveway, which was also crowded with thick plants, Dean navigated the car as it climbed the hill while Sam spewed off facts about the Police Auction on Friday—apparently the hospital was being sold because the state wasn't making any money off of it. After a few more uninteresting pieces of information that Sam felt compelled to share, including a particularly boring bit about the steel the building was made out of, Dean had parked the Impala in the gravel lot, then gotten out to take in the sight of the gigantic structure.

For some reason, he hadn't expected the building to be as large as it was, and as he took a few steps toward the sanitarium, his eyes scanned the ancient-looking edifice with amazement while varying shades of gray stared back at him. Like the sheriff had said, all the windows had been smashed out of their frames, giving the place a hollow appearance. Rust or some other kind of corrosion leaked through the walls onto the façade, as if trying to escape the dark interior of the building.

And dark it was. Even in the bright light of day, not a ray of sunlight seemed to touch the inside of the hospital. As he and his brother stood directly outside of the front entrance, Dean could see nothing but pitch blackness before him, causing a shiver to run down his spine. It wasn't often that Dean Winchester was afraid to walk into a place that claimed to be haunted, but with the story the sheriff told them coinciding with what was written inside Dad's journal, he was a little leery of entering—and it seemed as if he wasn't the only one.

Sam stood frozen in place beside him, with a shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in another. He, too, was staring up at the building, though Sam's eyes seemed to be registering the gunk leaking out of the walls.

"Shall we?" Dean asked, putting on a brave face despite the tremors running down his back. Though he normally didn't feel much aside from the twinge of anticipation upon investigating a building, something was radiating from the inside of the hospital that was causing him to clam up and telling him to turn back. Ignoring it, he shot a look at his brother, who seemed equally anxious. "Sam?"

Sam took a deep breath and nodded, cocking the shotgun in his hands and clicking on the flashlight before leading the way in. Dean did the same, only in his hand he held a pistol instead of a shotgun. He had determined before heading for the door that anything could be hiding in the shadows within the sanitarium. The shotgun, loaded with rock salt rounds instead of actual buckshots, could stop ghosts and slow down demons, but if there was something _else _inside the building, something the rounds would have little to no effect on, there was a possibility that that wouldn't be enough. Dean had grabbed his favorite nickel-plated .45 from the glove box as an afterthought, then decided that it would be his primary weapon as they checked out the interior of Waverly Hill.

As they made their way toward an abandoned receptionist desk that seemed to have been smashed with some kind of blunt instrument in several places, Dean noticed something. The air inside the building was thick, like it always was whenever they encountered spirit activity, and smelled strongly of o-zone. Maybe he was wrong about his previous _Heathers _comment when it came to the murder of Terri Sanders. Maybe the girls weren't lying when they said a ghost had killed their friend.

Stopping by the desk, Dean looked right while Sam looked left. On Sam's side, there was a set of stairs and an empty room; on Dean's, a large archway with MORGUE painted over it. Knowing that that was definitely the first place he wanted to check out, Dean nudged Sam with his elbow and nodded toward the doorway. "That way."

"Makes sense," Sam whispered. "Most spirit activity happens in the place the person died… though this would be a bit literal."

A smile touched Dean's lips as he lead the way into the morgue. Inside sat two gurneys and two rooms on opposite walls. Dean pointed his flashlight at the largest hole, one that looked as if it had been roughly constructed, and saw that it was one part stairs, one part slope. Sam's beam chased his brother's, quickly followed by a frown. Noticing his expression, Dean turned to him. "What?"

"This must be the body chute," Sam said, heading toward it.

"Excuse me?"

"Well, when this place was overloaded with TB cases, the doctors had to find a way to get the bodies out of the hospital without the patients seeing them. Apparently if they saw the bodies, the patients would lose the will to live," Sam shrugged. "Anyway, they used this chute to lower the bodies to an awaiting hearse at the bottom of the hill."

"Sounds vaguely morbid," Dean scoffed.

"Seriously," Sam agreed, standing at the mouth and pointing his flashlight down. Unfortunately, the beam only illuminated a fraction of the tunnel.

"Check it out," Dean nodded, joining his younger brother and pointing to a trail of blood leading down the right of the hole. "Must be where she died—_if _she died. I'm not entirely convinced yet."

Without saying anything, Sam began making his way down the steps to the left of the chute. Dean followed behind, his eyes drinking in the sight. Near the top of the slope was a splatter of red that looked as if someone had dropped a small water balloon on the floor then ran a broom through it, which continued down in a straight line until…

"Where'd it go?"

Sam stopped in his tracks. He had been examining the chute itself instead of watching the stream of dark liquid. "What're you talking about?" Dean pointed to the streak of scarlet that suddenly disappeared at his feet. Sam crouched down to get a closer look, only to stand up again moment's later. "Huh."

"Yeah," Dean agreed. "C'mon. Let's check out the rest of this place."

Leading the way up the steps and out of the morgue, Dean glanced quickly into the autopsy room before heading back to what was once the main lobby. Directly in front of him was a flight of stairs that lead to the higher levels, but he wasn't exactly sure he wanted to climb them. Something about this place was getting under his skin—which was odd, especially by his standards. Even with some of the cases he had worked in the past, including a Pagan god that was killing couples and wearing their skin like a new winter coat, he had never felt this anxious before. In all honesty, he felt as if he was being watched.

Glancing around, he saw the cameras Sheriff Dyer had mentioned earlier, perched in the corners, the red light that usually told him they were being recorded extinguished. Though he believed the sheriff when he said the cameras were fakes, Dean couldn't help but wonder if something equally ubiquitous was taking in their every move.

Looking at Sam, he knew his brother was feeling it, too. Sam's shoulders and back were rigid, which usually only happened when his brother was afraid of something. Dean had learned this code early, back in their first days of hunting alongside their dad when he was sixteen and Sam was twelve. Whenever Sammy got tense, that's when Dean knew something was up. His brother had always had a sixth sense about things, which had intensified in the past half year when Sam began having psychic visions of people about to die. The visions had been helpful a couple of times, but hurtful the last time they found themselves in a situation like this—only the previous event happened inside an abandoned mental hospital where the patients had turned anarchists on the head psychiatrist. Dr. Ellicot had focused on Sam's ESP like a homing beacon, which had resulted poorly for both of them.

Shaking it off, Dean sighed and stepped onto the first stair. "Now or never."

Sam nodded him forward in encouragement, then followed his brother up to the second floor. They paused at the landing, looking down a pair of hallways that stretched out in front of them in opposite directions. The corridors seemed unstable to walk down, as if the floor would fall out beneath them or the walls would crumble if they touched them. Dean turned to Sam and the two exchanged a nod. There was no way they were going down there unless they had to. It was better to be safe than risk injury for the sake of investigation.

The third floor was more of the same, but this time none of the doorways had doors. Dean stepped down the first corridor, Sam only a moment behind him, and peered into each room. Skeletons of beds and destroyed furniture sat inside underneath piles of dust and cobwebs, but the hallway was otherwise normal for an abandoned hospital. The only thing that seemed out of place was the fact that there were still bars on the windows in some of the rooms, and even that wasn't much cause for concern.

Returning to the stairs, Dean shot a look at his brother to see that he had out their homemade Walkman/EMF meter and noticed it wasn't lighting up or making the usual screeching noise that was associated with spirit activity. Suddenly, a thought struck him, causing him to frown. "What floor was it that the nurse hung herself?"

"Uh, fifth… I think. Why?"

"No reason," Dean shrugged, then rounded the stairwell to head up to the fourth, then fifth, floor.

When they reached the topmost landing, the sensation of anxiety that had been gripping on the bottom floor only intensified. Dean could feel his hands shaking, causing the flashlight beam to point unsteadily ahead of him as he made his way toward the mouth of the hallway to the right. As he expected, a squeal escaped the EMF meter and Dean turned around to see Sam staring at the display. A second later, he dropped it in surprise as the thing began to spark. "What the…"

As it hit the ground, the top of the device flashed once more before falling silent. Bending down, Sam gingerly picked it up between his thumb and index finger, flicking the switch to the "off" position before shoving it in his pocket.

"I'm officially convinced," Dean grimaced.

"Yeah, tell me about it," Sam said, taking a step forward. All of a sudden, a cold breeze passed throughout the hallway, hitting Sam like a blast of hurricane wind. Raising an eyebrow, Dean shot his brother a concerned look and noticed that Sam seemed to be struggling against himself. "I can't move."

"What? Why?" Dean asked, making his way over to his brother and tugging sharply on his arm. All Sam did was groan. "Man, am I sure glad you convinced me to come here."

"Just shut up and help me," Sam muttered.

"I have an idea. Hold still."

Standing in front of him, Dean pushed his hands as hard as he could into Sam's chest. A second later, his brother fell backward onto the floor and let out a loud "oomph!" before getting to his feet. "Thank you."

"Yeah, no problem," Dean mumbled, looking around the room for the source of the gust but seeing nothing. "I don't think the residents around here like you very much."

"Yeah, I can see that."

Dean smirked at his brother's agitated tone before starting backwards down the corridor closest to him. "You stay here, Haley Joel. I'll be back in a minute. If you start to see any dead people, let me know."

Sam rolled his eyes at the comment, but stayed leaning against the banister beside the stairwell without a word.

Dean turned back to the long hallway and relaxed his shoulders the best he could. If he had some kind of "tell" like Sam's rigidness that informed his brother whenever he was afraid or nervous, he hoped Sam didn't know what it was. Dean hated to display any kind of weakness around his younger brother. He was the oldest; he was supposed to be the brave one. Anything that would give Sam a hint they should give up and go home wasn't acceptable. They had a job to do, and they were going to do it—even though Sam being rooted to the floor was enough of a reason to turn around and head back to the motel.

Stopping just outside of the second door to the right, a tremor cascaded down his spine as he peered up at the peeling numbers above the threshold: 502. Something about that seemed familiar to him, but he couldn't remember what it was. Taking a deep breath, he made a mental note to look it up in Dad's journal when they got back to the car.

Pointing his flashlight and .45 into the emptiness of 502, he looked around. Nothing was inside except for two splintered beams that looked as though they had broken free of the ceiling. Everything else was cleared out.

Turning around, he continued down the corridor until he reached the end, glancing inside of every room as he passed an open doorway. The other rooms seemed to be just as empty as 502, which Dean wasn't sure should be considered comforting or eerie. Given the sensation of the building, Dean decided on the latter and quickly headed back to Sam near the banister. "Let's go… do some research."

Sam smirked at Dean's near admission that he wanted out of there before leading the way down the stairwell. When they hit the bottom floor, Dean all but bolted for the gravel lot outside. As he neared the Impala parked a few yards from the sanitarium's entrance, he took a deep breath and leaned against the roof, feeling the constricted sensation from inside loosen ever so slowly. A couple of moments later and his jaw felt unclenched enough to speak more than a handful of words.

"What the hell?" Dean scowled.

"Tell me about it."

"No, I mean _what the hell_?" Dean repeated, earning him a grin from his brother. "Have you ever felt anything like that before?"

"No," Sam admitted with a frown. "I think I'll take you up on your research offer, though. We need to know more about that place before we go in again."

"Yeah. Let's go back to the motel and get cracking," Dean said, opening the car door and sinking inside, then silently adding _anything to get away from here_ as he waited for Sam to do the same.

When his brother was safely in the passenger's seat, Dean nodded to him before giving the place a long, grueling look, then starting the engine and driving away.


	5. Chapter Four

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

FOUR

Daze Inn Motel  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Monday, June 19, 2006  
>11:53 PM<p>

**A**fter hours of research and hardly any results, Sam shut the lid of his laptop at close to midnight and rubbed his eyes. In the bed beside the desk he was currently sitting at, Dean was out like a light—Dad's journal resting on his heaving chest and mild snores escaping his open mouth.

Sam smirked to himself as he watched Dean in the flickering glow of the television. Since coming back to the motel room they had rented that morning, his brother had been detached and sluggish, and had fallen asleep as soon as night was on the horizon. In the hours leading up to his eventual slumber, he had been sifting through Dad's journal, looking for something on room 502, which apparently was supposed to hold some kind of significance. When Sam claimed he hadn't heard of it, Dean, in his last bout of energy, had rolled his eyes and grunted discontentedly, mumbling about pain-in-the-ass little brothers.

At the time, Sam hadn't thought much of it, more focused on the history of the hospital than anything else, but when research was beginning to lag, he couldn't help but wonder if Dean was onto something. Unfortunately, all a Google search had turned up was information on the area code, which was ironically the same number, and a local news website detailing the same facts outlined in Dad's journal—everything else was more obscure or password protected.

Deciding to leave the hacking for the morning in order to give it his full attention, Sam rested his chin on his propped-up palm and stared around the room. It resembled almost every other run-down place they had stayed at, with the exception that this one had a cabin theme that was better kept up than some of the other dives they had slept in. The walls were papered in fake wood paneling, with paintings of hunting lodges tacked above the beds. The one dresser in the room, placed under the television to double as a stand, had antler drawer pulls and feet carved to look like that of a deer.

The bathroom portion of the room, however, looked exactly like every other motel in the nation. Formica countertops, two basins, and a door leading to the shower were dimly illuminated by the black-and-white TV half-way across the room. The top of the sink was loaded with Sam and Dean's duffle bags, along with Dean's discarded suit jacket that had been shrugged off and tossed aside as soon as they had gotten back from the sanitarium. His brother, no matter how much Sam insisted otherwise, had been too tired to hang it up and claimed he would iron it if it was wrinkled in the morning.

_Right_, Sam snorted to himself, thinking back on the conversation. _Like Dean knows how to use an iron._

In all honesty, though, Sam didn't blame his brother for being wiped out after the trip to Waverly Hill. Ever since getting in the car to leave the hospital, his thoughts had been heavy with questions and didn't seem to want to stray from the feeling he had gotten on the fifth floor of the building. Something weird was going on, that much was for sure.

_But what_? _And what _was _that_?

Playing back the moment he had reached the topmost landing for the hundredth time, Sam remembered it with perfect clarity: He had stopped on the last stair right after Dean, and had nearly been blown backward by an inhuman force. Using as much strength as he could muster, he had tried to move forward, but couldn't. In fact, he couldn't move at all. Something, or someone, had rooted him there.

After Dean had freed him from his invisible prison, he had continued down the corridor, an unmistakable expression of both fear and worry on his brother's face. Sam, however, had stayed near the stairwell. Like Dean had said, whatever was in the hospital didn't want him to walk down that hallway, and he couldn't help but wonder if that mysterious force had a reason. If it did, he had to find out what it was.

Which was what had pushed him into research mode. Sam had always been the first one to jump behind a computer or browse a book for answers whenever something weird turned up. When he was younger, he and Dean hadn't had much in the form of entertainment besides basic cable and Dad's old books whenever their father was out on a hunting trip and had left Dean in charge of the remote. One day, when Sam was about eleven and tired of _Bewitched _marathons, he had picked up one of Dad's dusty tomes and began reading. Since then, he had been delegated to research duty whenever something nasty rolled into town. It was what he did best, and though it had earned him a few names from Dean such as "geek boy" and "nerd", Sam's research was what kept them alive most of the time. Without it, they'd be shooting blanks.

But there was a reason behind his persistent learning this time. Now only did he want to know more about what had kept him near the stairs on the fifth floor, but he also wanted to know more about the sanitarium itself. Through what the website, Dad's journal, and Sheriff Dyer had told them all matched up to a T, he wasn't sure that was all there was to Waverly Hill. Unfortunately, even after five hours of clicking through sites, flipping pages in books, and reading articles that mentioned the hospital, he hadn't found much that would help him—which, honestly, frustrated him. There _had _to be something more.

Sam jumped to his feet as Dean rolled over to his side and caught Dad's journal in his left hand, careful not to accidentally nudge or wake his brother. Dean needed sleep. Their first trip to the sanitarium had taken a toll on him, which was a mystery in itself. Sam was psychic, both brothers knew that, but Dean feeling the same thing Sam felt was a new one. While his brother was finely tuned to the paranormal like most Hunters, he wasn't _that_ finely tuned. Anxiety had crept over both of them the closer they got to the hospital, and it wasn't the kind most people felt whenever approaching a haunted building. This was pure, blatant fear. It was something Sam, in all his years of hunting, had never experienced—and he wasn't exactly itching for another taste.

Folding the journal closed in his hands, he kept his thumb on the page Dean had been reading and neared the television. He was tempted to turn on a light, but knew that the illumination would wake Dean. His brother was not a heavy sleeper, and anything Sam did was likely to jolt him awake. Instead, he settled for the TV. It wasn't a constant stream of light, but it was enough to make out Dad's scrawl on the pages.

Sam read it over once, only seeing the same information he had read before. There were several ghosts that haunted the place, but none of them had died a violent death, or anything close to one, that would cause them to lash out on unsuspecting people. The head nurse had hung herself and appeared once in a blue moon, that he knew, but there were other smaller, nearly unmentionable ones that most people had seen: a little girl with a bouncing ball on the third floor, a group of children on the roof, and an adult couple sitting on a bench near the entrance. According to Dad's journal, after deep investigation, all of these spirits had died from tuberculosis before the vaccine was created. Also according to Dad's journal, the spirits were benevolent and the only reason anyone was scared of them was _because_ they were ghosts.

Sighing to himself, Sam closed the journal and placed it on the cabinet underneath the television, watching the flickering frame of the closing credits to _Gilligan's Island_. The set was old, with knobs on the side to change the channel, and hadn't held up well. The picture was constantly bouncing up and down or becoming suddenly snowy, but it was still working to say the least. Most motels they stayed in didn't have a working television, much to Dean's dismay and Sam's relief. Dean had a knack for finding channels he would be better off watching alone, and most of the time managed to distract Sam with the volume. Either too many shotgun blasts had done hell on Dean's hearing or he just enjoyed pissing his brother off—whatever the reason, Sam wasn't fond of the noise. They weren't in town to sit back and watch old re-runs; they were there to work.

Dean let out a loud snore, causing Sam to jump. He was still on edge from the intense… _whatever_ he had experienced earlier, and probably could have used a nap himself. This was the third night he had gone without even a wink of sleep, and the lack thereof was wearing on him. He was becoming irritable and unfocused, which he attributed his limited number of search results to, and neither brother could afford for Sam to be less than one-hundred percent while on the job. Sam and Dean had to watch each other's backs, and Sam couldn't do that if he was struggling against his closing eyelids.

Deciding that he had hit a wall in terms of research, Sam leaned back and stared at the ceiling. As soon as his head hit the pillow, much to his dismay, all uneasiness from the previous day's events ebbed away, only to be replaced with a more familiar dread. It was on the ceiling that Jessica had died, and looking up at it now reminded him of the night of the fire. He knew that if he slept now, he would dream of nothing but the flames licking his skin, Dean tearing him away from the house, and the loneliness he felt standing by the Impala as he watched the smoke billow out of the damaged windows.

But he needed sleep, despite everything. Three days is a few too many to go without it, and he knew that even though Dean had remained silent about Sam's nightmares, finding out his younger brother had pulled another all-nighter was going to raise even more concern, and might even be the breaking point that lead to one of his brother's patented "we need to talk" conversations that Sam had been trying to avoid since their last one in Nebraska. Thankfully, he had managed to slip free of that one by telling Dean there were some things he needed to keep to himself. Ultimately, though, he had a feeling repeating himself wasn't going to work this time around. The longer Sam went without sleep, the more worried his brother seemed when it came to the subject. They had other things to do in the meantime. Having a heart-to-heart about something neither of them needed to be concerned with wasn't one of them.

Frowning, Sam pushed himself into a sitting position and tugged off his t-shirt, deciding to appease his brother by getting a couple hours of shut-eye. Getting to his feet, he then turned off the television and blinked a few times to adjust to the change in light. Blackness swallowed the room, causing exhaustion to further blur Sam's senses as he felt almost drunkenly for the bed. His head felt heavy, as well as his body, and as he climbed under the covers, he couldn't stop himself from drifting off…

* * *

><p><em>Sam lay on top of his bed with his eyes closed, listening to the light patter of the shower as the water hit the floor of the tub. He was back from his hunt with Dean, and was glad to be home. There was no way he was going back to that life. Sam was a Stanford man now. Hunting was nothing more than a part of his dark past.<em>

_ Suddenly, something cold dripped onto his forehead as he realized the shower had shut off. He kept his eyes closed but knew what the cold wetness was: Jessica was out of the bath, standing over him, ready to welcome him home. He smiled to himself as another drop of water fell on him, then wiped it away and opened his eyes._

_ Only to realize that it was blood that stained his hand, not water._

_ "Sam…"_

_ Looking up bewilderingly, it took a minute to absorb the scene on the ceiling before him. Jessica stared down at him, the white nightgown she was dressed in soaked with red around her midsection, and a look of absolute terror on her pale face. Her blonde, curly hair hung over her shoulders, as if she were laying on the floor looking up at him instead of the chilling alternative. _

_ "No!" he breathed._

_ As soon as the words escaped his mouth, the flames exploded behind her. To his right, he heard the door kick in and knew Dean was there, but didn't look at him. Sam was too transfixed on the sight above him, ignoring the fire that was engulfing the room._

_ Dean grabbed his brother around the middle, pulling him away from the blaze. "There's nothing you can do!"_

_ But Sam struggled against him anyway, fully aware of the logic in his brother's words but choosing to ignore it. It wasn't too late. It couldn't _be _too late._

_ "Jess!"_


	6. Chapter Five

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

FIVE

Louisville Sheriff's Station  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Tuesday, June 20, 2006  
>12:23 AM<p>

**T**he documents sitting on the tabletop in front of her swam in her vision. At the moment, there wasn't anything Detective Jessica Welby wanted more than a good night's sleep. Ever since being assigned the Terri Sanders case, she had been glued to her desk with nothing to keep her moving aside from bad coffee and the occasional phone call—and even those were wearing off. The last of both that she had received had been at close to eleven, and neither had been promising. The coffee had been the final dregs in the pot and the call hadn't been anything but a wrong number.

Jessica had been sitting in the same spot, with the rare break every few hours to stretch her legs, since close to three in the morning. She had returned to the station from her investigation of the creepy Waverly Hill Sanitarium at midnight only to spend a few hours interrogating the girls everyone was ready to lay the blame on, then dismiss them to sort through the faxes and random e-mails she had received in the meantime, both of which had piled up on the corner of her desk. Nothing at all helpful had come in, and she had a feeling this case would go cold before the end of the week if she didn't catch some kind of lead soon.

It was clear to her that Linsey Price and Sarah Kyle weren't responsible for what had happened to their friend. Jessica had thrown every question in the book at them, only to see the two girls break down crying and stick with their story of the ghost attacking their friend. Even after an hour of isolation, neither of them had cracked, leading her to believe that someone else was responsible for the murder of Terri Sanders—and by now, it _was_ a murder case. Blood results had come back from the stain on the concrete inside the sanitarium with a positive match, and the girl's mother claimed she hadn't seen or heard from her daughter since leaving for a dentist retreat in Baltimore with Mr. and Mrs. Price on Saturday night.

Normally, a murder case wouldn't have her attached to her desk in the back office of the precinct—she dealt with homicide on a daily basis—but something about this particular assignment wasn't matching up. The ghost story was obviously a null lead that wouldn't do anything but earn her an angry glare from her superior if she brought the idea to him, and with no motive, means, or opportunity to outline, she was running out of people to link to the crime. Terri Sanders had been nothing more than a high school student heading into her senior year, cheerleader, with a passable grade point average. There wasn't a thing anyone she had interviewed had said that would lead her to believe someone would want her dead. Unless the girl was a victim of wrong-place-wrong-time, which Jessica doubted, then she was missing something entirely. All she had to do was figure out what.

Suddenly, a knock on her door broke through the cold silence of the room, followed by the creak of the hinges. Looking up from the file on the hospital she had been pretending to read for the greater part of an hour while her eyes attempted to soak in what she was seeing, Jessica saw one of the graveyard officers—_Coles, I think_—standing in the archway with a weary smile on his face.

"What is it?" Jessica asked, sitting up straighter. "Something happen?"

"No," Coles answered, shaking his shaggy blonde head. "Just surprised to see you're still here is all. Everyone else went home hours ago."

"Yeah, well, crime never sleeps," Jessica replied wryly, giving him a tired grin.

"Yeah, and crime doesn't get solved with a sleepy detective, neither. C'mon, Welby, why don't you go home and catch some Z's before I come back to find you drooling on some old autopsy report?"

At this, Jessica couldn't help but laugh. Picking up her green and white "Master of the Messy Desk" coffee mug, she drained the last of its cold contents and stood up, shutting a manila folder while she did so. Rounding the side, she slid past Coles as he held the door open for her and headed down the stark white hallway that lead to the front of the station, the officer not far behind her.

"Everything here seems quiet tonight," Jessica commented, turning to look at Coles out of the corner of her eye.

"Yeah. Always is this time of night. Things don't start to heat up, if they do at all, until after three. It's like the criminals wait until everyone's sleeping to get down to business," Coles laughed.

Jessica smirked, but didn't say anything else until she was near the door. Passing the magnetic strip on the back of her badge through the slot beside the entrance, she waited for the red light to turn green before pushing on the metal bar leading out to the cool summer night. Shooting Officer Coles with as much of a warm smile as she could muster and bidding him goodnight, Jessica waited for him to nod in return before heading toward her car.

* * *

><p>By the time she arrived home, sleep was tugging at her eyelids and weighing down her brain. The inside of her apartment was dark, just as it was every other night, adding to the haziness she was currently experiencing. It had been a while since she had worked for so long, and there was an equal gap in time since she had last had to think so much. The Terri Sanders case was bothersome, making hardly any sense, and it was causing her mind to fuzz every time she thought about it.<p>

Deciding to push it back in lieu of a good night's rest, Jessica tugged off her blazer and threw it over the coat rack near the door, depositing her keys in the tray beside it. She knew she would be picking both of those back up in only a few hours, but she didn't want to think about that now—or, well, think about anything. All she wanted was to climb into bed and spend at least two or three hours in a blissful, slumbering state.

Heading through the kitchen to get to the hallway leading to the bedroom, Jessica pulled her chestnut hair up into a ponytail as she walked, allowing her neck to breathe in the chilly air wafting through the house. Her feet padded softly on the carpet as she continued to the last room on the left and pushed open the door. The motion light near the archway popped on as she made her way to the nightstand to tap on the touch lamp, giving her a start. She had installed that thing years ago, but it never ceased to surprise her when she least expected it.

When the lamp clicked on, the motion light extinguished and Jessica shook her head. One of these days, she was going to yank that thing from the wall, but today was not one of them. Her mind was too full of crime scene photos and hear-say statements to think about anything else, meaning that motion detectors were the last thing she wanted to worry about—in fact, everything was the last thing she wanted to worry about.

Slipping off the rest of her work clothes, she pulled on her nightgown and tossed her dirty pantsuit toward the hamper. It fell in with a satisfying swish, and Jessica couldn't help but smile to herself. When the moment passed, she pulled back the unmade sheets and climbed inside, making sure to reach over and shut off the lamp before fully sinking into the warmth of her queen-sized bed.

_Ah! Finally._

The down comforter embraced her snugly as she began to drift off, the blackness of the room blurring around her as sleep began to fill her brain. Unfortunately, she didn't fall too far into dreamland before…

The motion detector near the doorway popped on once again.

Sitting up, Jessica combed her fingers through her ponytail nervously as she looked around. In the faint silver moonlight trailing in through the blinds, she could see nothing out of the ordinary that would cause the light to malfunction, but the thing had never turned on unprovoked.

Taking a few more minutes to look around, she sighed resentfully at the motion detector before nestling back under the blankets. After a long moment, the light turned off, plunging the room back into darkness.

_I'm taking that thing out before I go to work tomorrow_.

She let the covers embrace her once again and shifted comfortably beneath the quilts, but it wasn't long before something else was brought to her attention. From the carpeted hallway came the sound of footsteps, muffled just like her own, but heavier, as if someone were stomping. This time, she sat up and pushed the sheets away, reaching over to the nightstand to retrieve the 9mm she kept in the top drawer. When the cool metal was held safely in her hand, she stepped lightly toward the doorway, her stealth obstructed by the damn motion detector, and pointed the weapon around the corner before glancing down each end of the corridor. When she saw nothing strange, she headed toward the only other room this side of the kitchen to make sure it was clear before checking the living area.

When every room was deemed empty, she sighed and lowered the weapon before making a beeline for the sink. She was in desperate need of a glass of water and possibly a sleeping pill. Maybe if she took one of those, she would finally be able to get the rest she needed without the delusional interruptions.

Grabbing a glass from the cupboard, she held it under the tap and waited for it to fill to the brim with clear liquid, secretly wishing it was vodka rather than water. Taking a long gulp, she lowered the glass and set it on the counter before rooting around in one of the drawers near her hip for the bottle of Tylenol PM she kept there.

Before she could find it, however, the sound of crashing came from her bedroom.

Picking up the gun, she crept toward the end of the hall and glanced inside. The motion detector was on, either relit or still on from the last time, and the lamp beside her bed had fallen off of the nightstand to become a broken heap on the floor.

_Someone is definitely in here_.

Passing her hamper, Jessica moved toward the bathroom and flicked on the light. Nothing but her Spartan decorating stared back at her.

Suddenly, the sound of a deep, throaty growl came from behind her, sending a shiver down her spine. Whipping around, she pointed her 9mm toward the direction of the noise, only to have it knocked from her hand in an unexpected gust of wind. Dust arose, from seemingly nowhere, before solidifying into the shape of a woman with scraggly hair and bright red eyes. Her nurse's outfit was tattered and dirty, and appeared to come from several decades before.

The longer she stared at the figure, the quicker she realized what she was seeing. Sarah Kyle and Linsey Price had described Terri Sanders' attacker in the same way: messy hair, wild eyes, and dated clothes. Jessica now understood why she couldn't make heads or tails of the case—the ghost the girls had claimed killed their friend was standing _right there_.

The growl came again as Jessica stood rooted to the spot. Every fiber of her being wanted to move, but couldn't. Fear, or something else, held her there.

Gasping, Jessica's eyes searched the room for a way out. The spirit stood only a few feet in front of her, leering, and the detective was sure the woman would be on her before she moved an inch. Still, despite the fact that her limbs seemed frozen in place, she owed it to herself to survive. It was something she had learned all those years ago at the academy: survival is key.

Her gun lay about a yard to her left, up against the wall in the hallway. There was no way she was going to be able to get to it in time, and seeing as she wasn't sure the weapon would work on ghosts, diving for it would probably be a bad idea. She just had to get out. The gun could stay where it was as long as she got herself to safety.

Deciding that her best mode of escape would be through the bathroom window to the small garden just outside, Jessica gathered her strength and bolted for the door. Unfortunately, the ghost was quicker and immediately blocked her path. A second later, she found herself slammed against the wall underneath a painting of a serene lake she had hung there a long time ago. The artwork fell free, smashing onto the floor with an audible thump, followed by cracking glass.

Suddenly, she felt the cold hands of the spirit wrap their way around her neck as she was lifted off her feet once again—this time with her back pushed against the wall. Her toes barely grazed the carpet below as she kicked at the ghost, only to find that her blows hit nothing but air. Nevertheless, she kept trying, hoping blindly that her foot would land on something solid. Ultimately, though, all her exertion did was wear her out.

Just as she was about to try one last time, the hand of the ghost gripped tighter, cutting off the last wisps of oxygen flowing to her lungs. Black spots swam before her eyes, much like the paperwork she had been staring at earlier, and she bitterly realized the uninformative documents would be a welcome change to the situation she was in now. She knew, though, that she would never be given the chance to choose between the two as the ghost pulled Jessica toward her before slamming her roughly against the wall. Plaster crumbled behind her while the spirit retracted its arm to repeat the maneuver.

The second time her body hit the sheetrock, Jessica could feel a trickle of blood flow from the back of her head and down onto her neck. Staring apprehensively into the spirit's eyes, she saw feral determination beneath the red.

On the third slam, Jessica's consciousness began to blink in and out, and she decided that she would do the most elementary thing she could come up with in order to ensure her survival. It was something so simple, but seemed so out of her capacity. Opening her mouth, she pushed the remaining air out of her lungs in order to muster the most ear-splitting scream she could summon.

Nothing came out but a tiny squeak.

At Jessica's feeble last attempt to save her own life, the spirit smiled. The lips curled in a cold, malicious grin that would have scared even the most frightening of serial killers. For the last time, the ghost pulled back its arm and pushed Jessica into the wall with mind-blowing strength.

Blackness crowded the corners of her vision and she could feel her life slip away in the stream of blood flowing down her back. Giving the spirit one last look, Jessica saw the ghost's plastered-on smirk and hated that it would be the last thing she would ever see.


	7. Chapter Six

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

SIX

Daze Inn Motel  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Tuesday, June 20, 2006  
>4:56 AM<p>

**D**ean rolled over in bed and stared sleepily over at Sam across the room, smiling to himself as he saw his brother lying still under the covers, his chest heaving rhythmically. It was the first time in a long time, probably since before Sam had gone to Stanford, that Dean had awoken before his younger brother. The change was something he could live with. Sam staying up all night, driving around town in the Impala, and spending mornings in out-of-the-way motel diners wasn't exactly what Dean would want for his brother. Sleep kept Sam from snapping at him, and it also kept Sam sharp. If they were going to hunt together, they needed to have their batteries charged and ready to go at all times. Anything less could result in failure, or worse.

Pushing the covers back, Dean got to his feet and tried to remember how he had gotten under the heavy sheets in the first place. The last thing he remembered was Ginger in that hot bikini in black and white with Dad's journal propped up on his chest. Maybe he had pulled them back when he was half-asleep and climbed underneath? Whatever it was, it wasn't important. He had gotten a full night's rest, and so had Sam—for the first time in what felt like a year.

Glancing at the clock, Dean saw that it was close to five in the morning. Knowing that they had a haunted sanitarium to investigate—_again_—possibly two witnesses to grill, and a pile of research waiting for them somewhere in the depths of the Internet, he took a seat behind Sam's closed laptop and popped open the lid. The computer sprung to life immediately, picking up where his brother had left off the night before. Various tabs told him that Sam hadn't strayed far from the same type of research Dean had been looking into the night before, with the exception that it seemed Sam and his nerdy brain had found more on the subject with his computer than Dean had with Dad's journal.

A browser window sat open in front of him with four tabs splayed across the top. The titles of each were clearly visible, and much to his delight, Dean realized that Sam _had_ taken him seriously when it came to the topic of 502. Two of the tabs were dedicated solely to room itself.

Clicking the first to the right, he waited for the page to refresh itself—an annoying tendency Sam's aged, worn-out Dell had whenever switching between sites—and tapped his fingers impatiently against the base of the laptop. When it was done, Dean couldn't help but smirk at how amateur the layout appeared. Though he wasn't all that knowledgeable about computers like Sam was, even he knew the page, had it not ended with .edu or been pulled up by his brother, would have been passed off as another teenager's personal blog. The background was black and littered with slow-moving stars, purple text covering most of the screen. To the left, links in red proved hard to read against the shimmering wallpaper, as well as the header titling the page as "A Study on Local Legends by Professor Melissa Dyer" in bright yellow.

_Sheriff's wife_? Dean frowned before highlighting most of the handwriting-like font in order to make it out. Most of the text contained information he already knew in a long summary just above the part of the site he had been looking for. In a bolded headline near the end of the page were the magic words: "The Eerie Deaths of 502".

Grinning to himself, Dean shifted in his chair before leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table.

"_Perhaps the most infamous room in the most infamous of hospitals is room 502 of the Waverly Hill Sanitarium. The story, passed down through the years, began in 1936 when the head nurse was found dead in the room. It is said that she hung herself from a light fixture—though upon further investigation, it's clear that it was from the room's support beams—and was found hours later. The woman, whose name is unknown, was a twenty-nine year old who had worked many years at Waverly, but after the discovery that she was pregnant with a married man's child, had taken her own life. It's said that many of her co-workers were not fond of the unnamed and that attributed to the lack of search for the poor woman when she hadn't turned up at shift's end. _

"_Four years later, another death took place in room 502. Incidentally, the victim was that of the hanged's former co-worker, Shelly Edwards, who had found the head nurse swinging from the room the years before. It's said that Mrs. Edwards, who was expecting her second child with doctor Samuel Edwards, had jumped from the balcony of the room, though reports of this are unconfirmed._"

Sitting back, Dean took a deep breath. So that was the mystery behind the room. Unfortunately, nothing about it told him squat—both on the case front, or the reason why the number had nagged at him all night. He wanted to ask Sam, to see if his brother had any theories as to what was going on with both 502 and the hospital, but decided to let him continue to sleep. Not only was Sam sprawled peacefully beneath the covers instead of thrashing like usual, but Dean remembered how uncomfortable Sam had been while discussing the sanitarium in the car on the way back to the motel yesterday.

Something had happened to his brother up there. It was one thing for Sam to be afraid—they normally bit that back and pushed on for the sake of the job—but to freeze entirely was a new one, as was being unable to move forward. Hopefully whatever had stopped Sam in his tracks would be a one-time thing. Dean wasn't sure they could continue with this case if Sam was playing wounded.

_Then again_, Dean reminded himself_, Sam _is_ psychic._

Maybe the reason his brother couldn't continue on was because he felt something Dean didn't—or maybe something inside the hospital was painfully aware of Sam's abilities. He hadn't asked, nor wanted to know the answer. The anxiety that place had given him without the added gift of ESP was enough. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what kind of vibes Sam had been picking up on if that was the case.

Before he could consider it further, however, one of the two phones on the nightstand between his bed and Sam's began to ring, cutting through the slumbering silence like a knife and riling his brother awake. Dean dove for the phone and flipped it open, hoping Sam would do nothing more than go back to sleep after he realized his brother had answered the call.

To his dismay, he knew that wouldn't be the case. Not because Sam was awake now that the shrill ring had awoken him with a start—surprisingly, he had already resumed snoring—but because of the conversation with the person on the other end. Sheriff Dyer sounded upset, and rightly so. Somewhere in between his orders to his men and snippets to Dean, he managed to convey the importance of the call. A detective, who apparently worked in the homicide unit, had been found dead in her apartment. Before Dean could wonder why the sheriff was calling him and Sam instead of dealing with it himself, his question was answered:

"We found a body this time, but it's a weird one. It's a skeleton, looks about a century old. Forensics is looking into it now for a positive ID, but I already know what they're gonna tell me. You boys might wanna get down here and take a look at this before we close up shop."

Dean snapped his phone shut and pushed the antenna of it against his temple out of frustration. Now there were two murders in two different places with completely different outcomes. Something about this wasn't adding up.

"Sam, get up," Dean said, placing his flip-top back on the nightstand before nudging his brother awake. "We got another problem on our hands."

* * *

><p>Sam had dealt with some weird cases in his time. There were wendigos and werewolves, shapeshifters and spirits, but none of them compared to the weirdness that was their current job, and he had incredibly high standards.<p>

Showering and dressing had been a race this morning, as had stopping for coffee, but after both of those tasks had been completed, Sam and Dean found themselves at the former apartment of Detective Jessica Welby. The place was small and quaint, and had it not been for the gruesome bloodstain and cracks in the wall, Sam would have found the apartment charming. Ultimately, though, they weren't there to review the place for _Better Homes and Gardens_; they were there to look at the strange murder scene inside.

"Strange", however, hardly described what they were seeing. Sheriff Dyer had told his men to clear out at the arrival of the brothers, and after they had filtered out one-by-one, all discussing theories on what had happened inside, Sam had begun a mental inventory of Detective Welby's former bedroom.

There was the blood and the cracks and a broken lamp, those he had seen many times before, but what made the place odd was the skeleton placed on the floor like a Halloween decoration. It was sprawled on the ground, its head propped up against the wall, as if it had been lying on the carpet and using the sheetrock as a pillow. Clothes hung off its frame, a light pink nightgown, that looked as if it had been buried and dug up after a century underground. The cotton was stiff, moth-eaten, and covered in dirt, with a big, cursive J near the shoulder.

"This is what's left of Jessica," Dyer had said after leading them through the doorway. "If I didn't have my head screwed on straight, I would think this was nothing more than a bad prank. Detective wasn't much older than forty when I saw her yesterday."

At this, Dean had frowned, taking out a small notebook from the inside of his jacket to jot down notes while Sam looked around. "When'd you last see her?"

"Last night. I was going home for the evening to have a date with my wife. Couldn't have been more than ten o'clock. She had just gotten back from another trip down at the sanitarium, saying something about not being able to connect the dots."

"She was working the Terri Sanders case?" Dean scribbled a note.

Sheriff nodded. "Yep. The head of her unit, Marcus, assigned it to her. To be honest with you, I think it was just to keep her busy more than anything else. The man took one look at it and deemed it unsolvable. He didn't like Jess much."

He had stopped talking after that, which Sam was glad for. Even though he knew there had to be more people in the world named Jessica than _his _Jessica, he wasn't very enthusiastic about having to hear the name repeated over and over again, especially not after the dream he had had last night. He had awoken twice—once at two o'clock, then again at four—and had attempted to forget the images he had seen in his nightmare by getting on the computer to restart his search for information on the hospital. When that didn't work, he read through the websites he had pulled up a couple of times to commit them to memory before keeping the tabs open for Dean to scan in the morning, then went back to bed to have the same nightmare one more time. Fortunately for him, the third round hadn't been as intense as the first two, and the lack of tossing and turning probably gave his brother the impression that he had slept the whole night through-which meant that Dean could now give his full attention to the case rather than worry about his younger brother's well being.

As if to validate Sam's thoughts, Dean's eyes continued to sweep the room, drinking in every nook, cranny, and crevice inside the small eight-by-ten. The bed took up most of the space, pushed against the wall near the door, with a nightstand on the left side between the mattress and the archway. A window to an outside garden was just above a roll-top desk near the foot of the bed, which seemed to be devoid of any hint that it had ever been used. The cracked wall was adjacent to that, blank except for the nail that had held up the fallen painting, connecting to the door to the bathroom. Beside that was a hamper and wall socket harboring a motion detector that didn't seem to want to work no matter how many times Sam walked past it.

"What I don't get is," Dyer said after a long moment of silence, "what she was shooting at."

"What do you mean?" Sam said, turning his attention away from his brother to look at the sheriff.

"Well, when Officer Coles responded to the call, he said he found a gun in the hallway. One of my men took it downtown with him to run the registry and got back to me before you guys showed up. He said the gun was owned by the detective. Now, I know Jessica like I know my own wife, and she was not a piss-poor shot. If someone was in here, she would have taken them down."

"Unless they weren't corporeal," Sam heard Dean mutter beside him, then he raised his voice for Dyer to hear. "I don't see any shots that were fired off."

"That's because there weren't," the sheriff answered with a slow shake of the head. "No. Whoever killed her had to have knocked the thing from her hand, which had to be some feat. Jess was tough. Came out top of her class back at the academy and could run any guy to the ground. Strange thing is, though, if they took it from her, they didn't leave any prints behind. Still doesn't explain how she ended up like this."

Out of the corner of his eye, Sam caught Dean tap the end of his nose, a signal they had used since they were kids. Dean was picking up on a faint scent somewhere beneath the cologne and sweat the police detectives had carried in with them.

"Would you mind giving us a few minutes?" Sam asked softly, giving the sheriff a small smile to show that he wasn't trying to rush the officer out of the room.

"Yeah, sure. Whatever you need," Dyer nodded, turning and exiting hurriedly, shutting the door behind him.

After a few seconds of waiting, Dean took in a long breath through his nose and pivoted toward Sam. "This one may not be as different as we thought." Before Sam could ask what his brother meant by that, Dean headed for the pile of bones in the back of the room and began poking at the corpse's nightgown with the eraser of the pencil he had been using to scribbled down notes. The fabric did nothing more than shake off a few crumbs of dirt. "Have you ever seen _The Grudge_?"

"No."

"Seriously? What did you _do _at Stanford? Sit around and read?" Dean scoffed.

Sam rolled his eyes. "What's your point?"

"Okay, well, the movie's about this spirit that dies violently, then starts haunting the place it lived, but not _just _the place it lived. After awhile, it starts attacking everyone that goes inside, sometimes even following them home to do the deed."

"And you think that's what's going on here?" Sam frowned.

"Call me crazy, but yeah, I do. Sheriff said he saw her right after she got back from the sanitarium and Terri Sanders _died _inside the damn thing. So far, it's the only thing that links the two of them." Sam nodded, but said nothing else. At his silence, Dean continued speaking. "Plus, this place smells like a vat of o-zone. Not the normal, killed-by-hairspray kind, either. That sanitarium had it's own brand of stink. I could smell it on my jacket when I put it on this morning."

As if to illustrate his point, Dean raised his arm to his nose and took in a deep sniff, quickly recoiling at the odor.

"So, what, you think the spirit followed the detective home from the sanitarium, then murdered her sometime in the middle of the night?" Sam asked, biting his lip in thought. "I don't know many ghosts that can do that."

"That's because there aren't any," Dean frowned. "Not any that I know of, anyway."

Sam sighed and nodded, taking Dean's theory into consideration. Before he could say anything more, however, his stomach let out a low rumble, which earned him a raised eyebrow from his brother. "Hungry?"

"A little," Sam admitted.

"Yeah, me too," Dean smirked. "I think we're done here, anyway. What do you say we think about this some more over breakfast? Hector Aframian's buying."

Sam smiled and rolled his eyes, then followed his brother out of the room.


	8. Chapter Seven

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

SEVEN

Tony's Café at Daze Inn  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Tuesday, June 20, 2006  
>8:20 AM<p>

**S**am took up residence behind his computer, tuning out the sounds of the diner around him. Just like in Fort Wayne, the plates and glasses clinked together, though without the tinny sounds of Jethro Tull carrying through a jukebox on the other side of the room.

Dean sat across from him, currently gobbling down as much as he could of his steak-and-egg omelet while flipping through Dad's journal with his free hand. Sam couldn't help but smirk at the hurried pace in which his brother was eating. Dean, who loved food as much as he loved his brother, hadn't been lying when he said he was hungry. Having forgotten both lunch and dinner the day before in lieu of the case, he was now shoveling forkfuls of eggs into his mouth, which was both amusing and disgusting.

Returning his gaze to his laptop after taking a bite of his own omelet, Sam clicked around some more. He had stumbled upon dozens of websites alluding to Dean's _Grudge _theory—which was a surprising find. Back at Detective Welby's apartment, he hadn't been convinced of his brother's movie reference, but now saw that the film had drawn its inspiration from a real haunting in Japan. Apparently, Dean had already known as much.

"The murders in Kobe in 1997? Yeah, I know," Dean had said flatly when Sam first brought it up. "They placed the blame on a kid, but it was actually a ghost raising hell. Murdered two teachers in their homes and attacked a bunch of kindergarteners after a field trip to maritime museum."

"How'd they stop it?"

Dean had shrugged then. "A Hunter salted and burned the remains. Should be easy."

"Yeah," Sam had sighed, "we just have to figure out whose ghost it is first, and why it suddenly started killing people. _That_ doesn't sound too easy."

"Yeah, well, keep working on it."

Silence had fallen between them shortly after, letting the clatter of dishes fill the swell of quiet. Dean continued to eat while Sam searched, taking occasional bites of his breakfast while pages loaded. Though his stomach was still growling every now and then, he couldn't bring himself to care. He was becoming too focused on the case to think about anything else, food included.

Assuming Dean was right and this was a vengeful spirit following people home, and that seemed to be their best theory so far, then that opened up a new floodgate of problems. The last time they had dealt with a ghost leaving its typical haunt was back in Eastern Iowa where a spirit had attached itself to a girl named Lori and the crucifix she wore around her neck—which had actually been a piece of silver reforged from the ghost's metal hook-for-a-hand. This case, however, didn't follow the same parameters as the last. Not only did the victims seem to be unattached to each other in any way aside from the fact that they had both visited the sanitarium, but neither of them shared anything in common. According to the computer search Sam had run earlier, Terri Sanders was a Louisville-born teenager and Jessica Welby had moved to Kentucky for college twenty years ago. Neither victim went to the same schools, lived in the same area, or seemed to know the same people. It seemed as if they came from two different worlds even though they had lived in the same town.

But if the sanitarium was the one thing connecting them, and the spirit was choosing its targets that way, then anyone who entered the building could be next on the list-including Sam and Dean. If that was the case, however, then why had the ghost chosen Detective Welby over Linsey Price and Sarah Kyle? They had both gone in the same night as Terri Sanders, yet had walked out of the hospital physically unscathed.

_Maybe there's a pattern to the way it's choosing its victims that I'm not seeing_.

Taking a deep breath, Sam leaned back in his seat and rolled his shoulders. There were too many questions and not enough answers. Glancing over at Dean, he saw that his brother was still staring at Dad's journal, as though hoping the book would open up to reveal the solution to all of their problems if he glared at it long enough. Dean's eyebrows were knitted together in concentration, his hard gaze switching back and forth from one side of the page to the other. After a moment, he seemed to feel Sam's eyes on him and glanced up.

"What?"

Sam smirked. "I don't know what you're hoping to find in there. You've read it more than a thousand times. It's not like anything's changed since you last looked at it."

Frowning, Dean sighed and shut the journal, folding his arms over the edge of the table. "Yeah, I know."

"Maybe we should ask around."

At this, Dean smiled, his eyes lighting up at Sam's suggestion. Sam knew this expression all-too well: his brother had been looking for an excuse to talk to one of the waitresses without making it seem like he was slacking on the job. After their last conversation about thinking more with his "upstairs brain", Dean had been trying to cut back on hitting on women in front of his brother. Sam had been growing particularly irritated whenever Dean became just as concerned with the opposite gender as he was with the case—which resulted in Sam becoming increasingly vocal about it. During their last job in Chicago, Dean had become equally interested in fooling around with a police officer named Amy as he was with retrieving the information they needed on the victims. That had earned Dean a tongue-lashing from Sam as soon as he got back from an overnight stay at the girl's house.

Sam's stare followed his brother's as the green browsed the diner, eventually stopping on the cluster of waitresses—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead—standing behind the counter. As the brothers watched, two of the women split in different directions—the blonde heading toward a booth on the other side of the restaurant, while the redhead passed through the door to the kitchen—leaving the brunette near the cash register with an obviously-flustered look on her face. She was tall, with long, ash-brown hair that fell past her shoulder blades in gentle waves. The t-shirt she was wearing was a deep black, as if just purchased, with the name of the diner emblazoned tightly across her chest in a neon green that accentuated her sage-colored eyes—though he doubted that was the t-shirt's purpose. As she stepped behind the counter and headed toward their table with a empty blue tub, Sam caught some of the men in nearby booths taking in the curves of her body, Dean included.

"I can take your plates if you're done," she said kindly, her voice raspy as if she had been speaking for hours on end, a weary smile on her face.

Dean peered up at her with a grin. "Seems like you're having a bad day."

"Second day on the job and they're already thinking of firing me," she admitted, leaning over to pick up their almost-empty plates and used silverware from where they were littered across the table. "I guess I was never really cut out to be a waitress."

"Well, most people aren't," Dean smirked.

"Yeah, probably," she agreed, hefting the tub she had deposited their dirty dishes in. "Anyway, if you need anything, my name's Kelly."

With that, she turned on heel and headed back toward the counter. When she had disappeared through the door to the kitchen like her co-worker had minutes before, Dean smiled to himself and took a sip of his coffee.

"That wasn't really asking around," Sam pointed out, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm not done."

Rolling his eyes, Sam shot a look at his brother before returning his gaze to the computer screen. His Internet search was still open, displaying various links with the name of the hospital in the blurb about the site underneath. Each title was the strange purple color of a visited page, and as he scrolled down, Sam despairingly realized that he had already read every one of them between last night and this morning.

Closing the computer, he shoved it into his bag and groaned. This case was moving too slowly for his liking. Usually he could find the pieces to the puzzle quickly, giving them plenty of time to take out whatever creature was wreaking havoc. With this case, however, it seemed none of the normal procedures were to be followed. The biggest clue they had was the hospital, but everything else they needed to sew together the missing bits were nowhere to be found. They didn't know whose ghost was doubling as a serial killer, why it was doing so, or how it was choosing its victims. Even after a full day's worth of work, they still held a place at square one.

"I'm gonna go talk to Kelly," Dean said finally, noticing his brother's harried expression.

Before Sam could get a word in edgewise, Dean was up and across the diner, stopping beside the cash register where Kelly now stood. Sam watched while they carried out a conversation he couldn't hear, Dean pulling out his wallet and credit card to pay their bill. As she went through the practiced motions of using the till, the machine to her right printed out a receipt, which she promptly scribbled something down on with a silver marker. After a few more minutes of speaking, his brother nodded in thanks before turning back to Sam, a toothy grin on his face.

"What'd you find out?" Sam asked, throwing his laptop bag over his shoulder and sliding out of the booth.

Leading the way out of the diner, Dean headed toward the Impala parked a few yards away, pulling the keys from his pocket with a smirk. "Her name is Kelly Taylor. She's a junior at University of Louisville, and lives in an off-campus apartment with her best friend, Delia… or something. Anyway, apparently the friend'll be out tonight and—"

"_And_ you'll be busy," Sam cut him off. "We're still working a job here."

"I've noticed," Dean snapped. "Don't be such a prude, Sammy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. We can have fun once and awhile. You remember fun, don't you?"

Sam glared at his brother. "What'd you find out _besides_ where she goes to college?"

Dean groaned and rolled his eyes. "Not much. She told me one of the professors at her school, the sheriff's wife, might be able to help us out. She's the one that wrote that website you left up this morning, right?"

Sam nodded. "Pretty sure, yeah."

"Alright, well, Kelly said she'd call and get us an appointment with her, but Teach's summer class isn't over until after eleven, so we'll have to wait to have a chat."

"What're we supposed to do until then?"

"Ye have little faith, Sammy," Dean smirked, then raised his eyebrows in a way that told Sam that his brother had asked the girl the same question. "Anyway, she then told me that there's a historical society on Third Street we should try in the meantime. It might not be any help, but it's a start."

Nodding again, Sam sank into the passenger's seat of the car and placed his laptop bag in the back. Historical societies were usually a bum lead when it came to ghosts since most of the places focused more on fact than on what they deemed to be fiction, but it was indeed a place to start—not to mention the fact that Sam, though he would never admit this to his brother, loved the subject of history as much as Dean loved food was an added bonus. To find out more about Louisville's past—the part that didn't involve spirits and sanitariums, anyway—would be a welcome wealth of information.

After a few moments, Dean fell into his seat and cranked the engine before pulling out of the gravel lot and onto the highway. The sound of road noise and the quiet strains of his brother's Lynyrd Skynyrd tape—which had been on repeat since crossing into Kentucky—filled the car while Sam looked at his watch. It was only ten minutes to nine. Hopefully they would find a way to stretch out their trip to the historical society to fill the gap between now and eleven. Most tours only lasted half an hour at the most, leaving him and Dean with a gap of time with nothing to do. Without any more research to trudge up from the depths of the Internet, the hour spent waiting around would be time wasted, and that was something neither brother would approve of. If they were going to hunt against Dad's orders, they had to be working around the clock. If not, the slow betrayal they felt from leaving Fort Wayne would creep up on them unnecessarily.

Slouching in his seat, Sam sighed and watched as the flat Kentucky grasslands passed by his window.


	9. Chapter Eight

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

EIGHT

Filson Historical Society  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Tuesday, June 20, 2006  
>9:28 AM<p>

**T**he Filson Historical Society hadn't been as much of a lead as Dean would had hoped. After walking through the front doors of the large, ornate mansion parked in the middle of a crowded, two-lane street, he had immediately regretted being so gung-ho about coming here. Once inside, he could understand how the waitress, Kelly, would have thought to suggested the place, but hadn't expected it to be so… lame.

_It looks like a stuffy art gallery_, Dean thought, looking around at the various portraits staring back at him from the glossy, wooden walls. Every room contained oil paintings, plaster busts, and oversized pieces of furniture that he was sure to bump into or knock over at some point during their tour of the house.

Their tour guide, a small man with a paunchy midsection and only a rough tuft of hair on his head, spoke to Dean, Sam and the five other people joining them throughout the Filson. The guide had introduced himself as Theodore McKinley at their first meeting, which had caused Sam to snort, though Dean didn't know what was so funny.

Other than Sam's small laughing fit at the beginning of the tour, Dean could tell his brother was in nerd heaven. Sam drank in every room they entered, examining every piece of shelving, ceiling décor, and rug inside of each while McKinley droned on about the people depicted in the portraits. Dean only half-listened, hoping to pick up on snippets about the sanitarium—if the guide ever got around to mentioning it. Currently, Paunch was in the middle of a lecture about someone named William Edward West, who apparently was some painter that died in 1857.

"A fateful encounter between Mr. West and George Noel Gordon resulted in the last life portrait of Lord Byron and—"

Dean stopped beside a particularly eerie bust of a man with very little hair and hard, stony eyes. The white plaster made his gaze seem even more chilling, causing Dean to recoil and grimace.

"What are you looking at?" Dean asked the bust, catching his brother's eye. Sam shook is head and turned his attention back toward the tour guide, who was still droning on about the painter. Frustrated, Dean tapped Sam's arm with the back of his hand. "Do you think this guy is ever going to get to the twentieth century?"

"Probably not," Sam frowned.

"Well, I don't want to be wasting my time learning about some dude who painted people when we've got a case to solve and I've got a girl to… _you know_," Dean winked.

Sam rolled his eyes, "Dude!"

Suddenly, the room fell silent as the tour guide stopped and looked over the handful of people in front of them to focus on Sam and Dean. His eyes were as beady as an insect and narrowed so intently that Dean couldn't help but be reminded of an English teacher he had had back in high school—only the teacher had been more subtle about noticing interruptions. This guy, however, seemed to have no qualms about pointing the brothers' rudeness out to the rest of the class. "Something you'd like to know, gentlemen?"

Every set of eyes in the group turned to look at them, causing Dean to squirm under their gaze and shoot a glance at Sam. His brother looked equally uncomfortable, and rightly so. Each pair of eyes seemed just as impatient as the tour guide's, as if Sam and Dean had interrupted the singlemost fascinating moment of their life. Deciding to diffuse the situation the best he could, Dean cleared his throat. "Nothing. We just, uh, were wondering when you were going to get to something more… recent."

"_Recent_?" Theodore McKinley asked, raising an eyebrow so far up his wrinkled forehead that it would have disappeared into his hairline if he had had one. "How recent?"

This time it was Sam who spoke, much to Dean's relief. He had a feeling the tour guide wasn't a fan of being pressured into hurrying through his long speech, but Dean knew Sam's ability to screw up his face to look nothing more than an overgrown college student with puppy-dog eyes and an innocent interest in whatever subject was being discussed was going to be their ticket to information. "We were actually hoping for some facts on the Waverly Hill Sanitarium."

The tour guide took a minute to appraise Sam, his raised eyebrow automatically lowering under the weight of Sam's child-like expression. After a moment, the man nodded. "We will be getting to that shortly. Is there any particular reason you're looking into the hospital, young man?"

"A lot of reasons, actually," Sam said with a small smile. "The history of the place is quite unique, as are the hauntings. I just thought if there was one place to go for information on the hospital, it would be here."

_Laying it on a little thick there, Sammy_.

McKinley nodded slowly, taking the bait, then returned the sheepish grin. "Very well. I will address it when we get to the next room."

With that, he turned on heel, the rest of the group turning with him, and continued his monologue about William Edward West, "The Kentucky Painter". When the man was a safe distance away, Dean shot his brother an approving smirk and followed the small crowd into a large parlor. This room was similar to the last, only it contained less paintings and more wood paneling on the walls. Two chandeliers hung from the ceiling above, giving the room a haunted-mansion feel, which Dean had little doubt was the angle the building was going for.

"Per the young man's request, I will skip—_for now_—the section of the tour summarizing Kentucky's part in the Civil War and begin at the very start of the twentieth century," the guide said, nodding toward Sam as if pointing out that he was to blame should anyone have any complaints about the change-up.

_About damn time_, Dean thought, attempting to hold back an eye-roll as the man began droning on about the part of the hospital's history that he already knew—when it was built, what it was used for, and so on. Glancing at Sam, he saw that his brother was equally as uninterested in the reiteration as Dean, but attempting to appear otherwise.

"—Shortly after construction on the new, five-story building ceased, things began to turn grim," McKinley said, sending a pointed glare at Dean between pauses. "The death rate of the sanitarium was higher than most hospitals in the state combined, and with no treatment for the disease, doctors were forced into barbaric practices, such as removing ribs, deflating lungs, and even administering lethal doses of primitive antibiotics that further amplified the numbers of the deceased. It soon became a terrible place to be sentenced.

"In 1926, the death rate was so high for the sanitarium that a death chute, if you will, was used inside the building to transport the dead out of the hospital without making the living patients aware of just how bad the situation had become. Originally, the chute had been used to levee medical supplies from the trains resting on the tracks below the hill, but with the steady invention of automobiles, that became obsolete, giving Dr. Samuel Edwards the idea for the new use of the tunnel.

"Toward the end of the 1930s, the deaths inside the hospital began to change from patients to staff. The first to die was the head nurse, who was said to have hung herself from the rafters of 502 after discovering she was pregnant—but that is up to much debate. Second was her assistant, Samuel Edwards's wife, Shelly. According to hospital records, the woman jumped from the window of the same room her co-worker had hung herself—although that is _also_ up for debate. Even now, despite the fact that those two deaths are still haggled over between academics and skeptics, 502 remains the most—_ahem_—'haunted' room in the hospital.

"It's said there are other ghosts, however, but none are as famous as the two nurses, and none that seem quite as interesting to outsiders. There have been some students from the University—especially those from Melissa Dyer's class," McKinley spat the professor's name like it was made of poison, "who have come in in the past to attempt to collect information on the long-dead, but none have had such luck. Finding facts on the nurses, especially the first one who died, has become increasingly difficult. Hanging oneself in those days was considered sin, along with the reason the woman had for doing so, causing her to be left out of hospital records and employee files to be destroyed."

Suddenly, the teenage girl in front of them with mousy brown hair and a very thin waist raised her small hand to interrupt the tour guide. McKinley nodded toward her and she quickly shoved her hands into her pocket and sent a furtive look at the ground before speaking. "I, um, read in the, um, newspaper that people have been dying in the hospital… like, yesterday?"

"True," McKinley nodded curtly.

"But why?" she asked, seeming to find a small bout of confidence. "Did she like, trip or something? I mean, like, the newspaper didn't say. They just said that her friends said, like, a ghost did it or whatever. But that's not true is it? I mean, like, ghosts don't kill people, right? That's just a movie thing."

The tour guide frowned and shrugged his small shoulders. "No one knows for sure. It's said that the day the first nurse died in room 502, a curse was placed on the hospital." As he said this, a small chill seemed to fall over the thin crowd, as if he had said something earth-shattering. Clearing his throat, the man's eyes panned over the group, soaking in their reaction. Dean could tell he didn't want to lead another discussion on the hospital and its past if it continued the way it did, and added: "Of course, such a thing is unrealistic at best. Ghosts, curses, and the like are all works of fiction."

"What kind of curse?" Dean piped up, trying not to smirk at the tour guide's obvious disapproval of the subject.

"Sir, I am a historian, not a fortune teller," McKinley snapped. "If you would like to discuss fantasy, I suggest you speak to Professor Dyer up at the University. She will be sure to indulge you on the dim-witted subject of ghosts."

It took all of Dean's willpower not to reply back with, "I will," and instead grinned at the hardwood floor. Glancing up, he saw that McKinley was leading the group into another room in such a huff that he left a dark cloud of anger behind. Rolling his eyes, Dean shot a glance at Sam, whose brow was deeply furrowed in thought. It was clear that the cogs in his brother's brain were hard at work. Something the tour guide had said seemed to have clicked with his encyclopedia-type mind. "What is it?"

Sam blinked a few times, coming out of his thoughts, and peered down at his brother. "I have an idea." Turning on heel, Sam lead the way out of the parlor and through an open door. Looking back, he saw that Dean was still rooted to the spot. "C'mon, already!"

Shaking his head and following, Dean grinned. "Alright, alright. I'm coming. Geez."


	10. Chapter Nine

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

NINE

Crescent Hill Library  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Tuesday, June 20, 2006  
>10:34 AM<p>

**T**here was no deterring Sam whenever something had sparked his interest, Dean knew, but that didn't stop him from being annoyed. After driving them to the closest library—the one the Filson had listed as a temporary house for all its books while their archives were being remodeled—Dean found himself face-to-face with an overzealous little brother and a pile of musty old journals that he had a feeling would crumble in his hands.

Sam hadn't explained what he was looking for. All he had said in the heat of his fervor was that Dean should start reading. He had a feeling Sam had only told him that to keep him busy while his brother searched feverishly though book after book, pushing each aside carelessly after he was finished with it. The librarian had told them that the bindings on the volumes were fragile and should be handled with precaution, but Sam seemed to be throwing that to the wind as he quickly scanned the pages of handwritten material for some unspeakable piece of information.

Shutting the journal Sam had placed in front of him—which further instilled his suspicion that his brother was giving him busy work seeing as it was dated decades before the sanitarium had been constructed—Dean looked out the walls of the glass-enclosed "Quiet Room" the old woman behind the desk had given them upon the flash of a badge: A few people were meandering the aisles, but not many. Most of the activity was contained in the children's section, where they had heard the beginning lines of _The Velveteen Rabbit _being read aloud to a group of kids upon entering.

Sam hadn't wasted any time as soon as he had pushed through the thick, wooden front doors of the library, immediately heading to the circular information center in the middle of the room that housed the woman who had given them some of the Filson's archives. She had the look and smell of a quintessential librarian with gray hair wrapped into a bun, an oversized cardigan, and layers upon layers of powdery perfume. Even though they were across the library and inside a separate room, Dean could still smell her musk. The odor was, if possible, worse than the o-zone wafting from the corpse of Detective Welby, and definitely more potent.

But the woman, who later introduced herself as Patty, was nice enough. Upon seeing their FBI badges, she hadn't asked questions and instead turned on heel to enter a private section across the floor. Before disappearing, she had offered them "Quiet Room One", as she called it, and told them she'd be back with what they were looking for as soon as she could find it. It took her ten minutes—ten long minutes of Sam's impatient finger tapping and lip biting—until she returned with boxes the size of filing cabinet drawers, three in all. Sam had overly thanked her, probably glad to finally get the ball rolling, before watching her walk away and tossing the first journal he didn't deem his toward Dean—who then just rolled his eyes, opened it, and decided not to say anything. Sam didn't seem to be in a sharing mood.

Glancing at his brother, Dean saw that Sam had stopped racing through texts to carefully read a page in front of him. After a few more moments, a smile broke out on his brother's face. "Found it."

"About damn time," Dean scoffed, placing the journal he hadn't read back in the box.

That had earned him a glare from Sam.

"What'd you find?" Dean groaned under the weight of his brother's gaze. "The map to Mordor? A way to get to Narnia? What?"

"You read?" Sam asked with a raised eyebrow and the touch of a grin.

"I saw the movies," Dean admitted with a shrug. "Anyway, what did you find that you needed to be so secretive about? Because whatever it is, it better be damn worth me sitting here bored out of my skull for the past half an hour."

Sam bit his lip. "Sorry. But I didn't want to say anything until I was sure. It was just a theory at first, but now that I think about it, I should have seen it sooner."

"Seen _what_ sooner?"

"Okay," Sam said, clearing his throat in that way that told Dean a long lecture was about to spill out of his brother's mouth. "Remember back at the Filson when that guy who named himself after two presidents—"

"_That _was what was so funny to you? You need a new sense of humor."

Sam narrowed his eyes at being interrupted and mocked. "Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley were the presidents in office around the turn of the century, _and_ when the Filson was first constructed. It was written on the same brochure that said this library was housing their—"

"Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Forget I said anything."

"Anyway," Sam smirked, "before we bailed, he said something that struck me. Remember when he said that when the first nurse died in room 502, a curse was placed on the hospital?" Dean nodded during Sam's pause, not wanting to further irritate his brother by interrupting him again. "Well, I remembered reading in one of Dad's books a long time ago that when a witch is killed, a curse manifests itself in the place of their murder."

"Right," Dean frowned, suddenly understanding where Sam was going with this. "Like that thing in Dad's journal about that guy that died during the Salem Witch Trials—"

"Giles Corey," Sam supplied.

"Yeah, him. He was murdered and now everyone says he shows up whenever shit hits the fan, right? Like that fire in Salem in 1914?"

Sam bit his lip. "Something like that. Some people believe he started it since his ghost was spotted the night before it happened."

Dean sighed and tugged on his earlobe. "But the woman in 502 hung herself."

"Maybe, maybe not," Sam said, straightening up. Dean knew this motion all too well. He was about to get an ear-full of information that would either be interesting or boring. With Sam, it was a fifty-fifty shot—though whatever his brother deemed fascinating usually caused Dean to fall asleep. "I was thinking about it on the way over here. What if the woman hadn't hung herself because she was pregnant like everyone says? What if she was hung and everyone used that as a cover story? I mean, it would make sense."

"Like what, they went all _Crucible _on _Rosemary's Baby_?"

"Well, yeah. Think about it, Dean: her employee files and hospital records were destroyed. Even in those days, if someone hung themselves in the building, they would have had to keep everything for insurance purposes and for the police investigation. If a group of people strung her up, they would've gotten rid of all the evidence that would point fingers."

Dean frowned, not entirely convinced that Sam's theory was legitimate. The employee files and hospital records could have been destroyed after the cops and insurance companies were done. The tour guide at the Filson had said that hanging yourself back in those days was still considered "sin", and it was possible that the rest of the staff didn't want to condemn themselves by holding onto evidence of the nurse's actions. "I don't know…"

"I do," Sam said, biting his lip and taking a minute to dig through the piles of papers in front of him before retrieving a journal that looked exactly like the one Dean had neglected. "Check this out."

Pushing the aged book toward his brother, Sam gave Dean an expectant glare as Dean held the volume carefully in his hands. The pages were covered with minute cursive in a faded purple ink, some of it so transparent that it was hard to make out a few of the paragraphs. Scanning the handwriting a few times, he finally landed on what Sam wanted him to read:

_Friday, June 19, 1936_

_ A horrible event happened on the fifth floor today. The body of a nurse I have been prohibited to mention by name has been "discovered", and everyone is describing the death as suicide. _

_ I spoke with Miss Edwards, who claims to have recovered the body, and she told me in secret that her warden was owed such a terrible punishment. When I asked the meaning behind such an ominous suggestion, she told me nothing more than to rid the hospital of the woman's apparent evil_

Placing the journal back on the tabletop, Dean scoffed. "People, man."

"Tell me about it," Sam agreed with a small grimace. "Anyway, I think that's when the story of the woman hanging herself spread. Sometimes people are dumb enough to convince themselves that what they see or did wasn't what happened, so the story probably stuck with ease."

"Yeah, like that time in Pennsylvania with that demon that took over the plane. By the time we got off, everyone was convinced they had just experienced some really bad turbulence." Dean smiled, recalling the memory. "Again, I say: people, man."

Sam frowned. "Yeah, well, that's not all there is to it. When the curse was placed on the hospital after her death, I think there was more to it than the traditional pox-on-your-house variety."

"What?"

"Shakespeare," Sam scowled.

"Sorry, I don't speak _nerd_," Dean mumbled, rolling his eyes.

Sam glowered in response, but didn't acknowledge the comment. Instead, he pushed the books in front of him aside, digging for the familiar one at the bottom. The brown leather cover of Dad's journal became unearthed a minute later, and Dean waited while Sam flipped through it before speaking. "Have you ever heard of the _Timor Animi_?"

Dean raised an eyebrow. "Isn't that a Japanese cartoon?"

"That's _anime_," Sam smirked.

"Oh. Then, no."

Turning his attention to Dad's journal, Sam paused to scan their father's scribbled writing before reading an excerpt aloud. "'Timor Animi_, Latin for "the fear feeling" or "fear of the mind" is a sensation left behind by the spirit of a witch who died a particularly violent death. It is said that the effects of the _Animi_ can be felt centuries after the deceased has passed and will not relent until after being put to rest. The phenomenon is frequently sensed by everyone, but stronger by those often in the presence of the supernatural. Psychics, mediums, and the clairvoyant are usually arrested in motion the closer they are to the convergence of the _Animi_—typically found in the spot the departed drew their final breath_."

"So that's why you froze?" Dean asked with a contented sigh, glad that his brother's sudden cease in motion was due to something all weird-o psychics felt and not some sign that the spirit haunting Waverly Hill was interested in Sam.

"Try not to sound too happy," Sam grimaced. "There's more to it. It goes on to say that if one of these things is present where a haunting occurs, it amps up the power the spirit has, probably giving it enough juice to go wherever it wants."

"Yeah, but the ghost of a witch can do that anyway. What I don't get is why it's only choosing certain people to go after," Dean said, shifting in his chair. "I mean, you how I said in that movie _The Grudge_ the ghost follows _everyone_ that goes inside the house home? Why's it just choosing those two girls and not us? Why didn't it go after those other two teenagers?"

"Well, usually spirits haunt people they have a connection to. We must be missing something when it comes to Terri and the detective."

Suddenly, Dean's watch began to beep, signaling that it was eleven o'clock. Grabbing some of the papers and books off the desk, he began to toss them into the boxes to his right, not bothering to place them inside gently. Sam did the same, only this time using the precaution the librarian had ordered to lower the fragile volumes into their storage bins. When they were done, Dean placed the lids on both and picked his suit jacket up from the back of the chair where he had carelessly slung it upon entering.

"You boys find what you were looking for?" Patty asked as the two of them walked past her desk and toward the front door.

"Yes, thank you," Sam replied with a genial smile.

The librarian returned the grin before heading to the room the brothers had just abandoned. Dean caught a glimpse of the woman carrying one of the boxes out of the glass enclosure before pushing open the heavy, wooden doors leading to the parking lot.


	11. Chapter Ten

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

TEN

University of Louisville  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Tuesday, June 20, 2006  
>10:57 AM<p>

**M**elissa Dyer had been having a really bad day. Not only had she been awoken by a phone call from her husband alerting her that her cousin, Jessica, had died during the night, but it seemed as if her summer semester American Hauntings class—which of all the terms she taught was easily the rowdiest—didn't seem to want to leave the subject alone. Any other day, she would have had no problem discussing the history of the Waverly Hill Sanitarium or the facts that could have easily been found on the web, but today was not one of those days. The death was too fresh and the location was too close to even try to speak about it.

Upon arriving on campus at close to six o'clock, Jessica's passing was an open wound that everyone seemed intent on salting over. In the mail room, other members of the faculty whispered harshly amongst themselves as she walked in, sending her furtive glances to make sure she wasn't listening. The head of the English department even had the audacity to try to spring a conspiracy theory on Melissa as she made her way out, but she had quickly escaped the conversation by claiming she had an early meeting with her TA.

Her students seemed, if possible, worse than the staff. Without any kind of tact, they had overridden her lesson plan of discussing the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, Australia to talk over their collective hypothesis that the ghost the girls from Central High claimed killed their friend had gone after "Detective Welby" to keep her from solving the case. One such student, Percy Meyers, loudly proclaimed that he had read online about spirits that follow people home. According to him and his Internet informant, it was a common voodoo practice to send a spirit after someone the practitioner didn't like. Then again, Percy also believed he knew the secret location of Hogwarts, so it was unlikely that anyone would believe him.

To her relief, her phone had rung loudly toward the end of class, silencing everyone in the small room as they attempted to listen to the exchange. A girl, who claimed to have been in Melissa's fall semester Hauntings class, informed her that a couple of men were coming by to talk to her about the sanitarium. It took all of her willpower not to groan at the girl on the other end of the line, but instead thanked her and hung up before dismissing her class and heading straight to her upstairs office.

_I've worked too hard to tell them everything. I'll just tell them the basics. If it's a reporter, they can live with that. If it's someone else, someone who might be able to help with my research, then maybe I'll reveal a little more. Maybe._

Pulling out every piece of information she could find on the hospital—just in case it was someone besides one of the slimeballs from the _Courier-Journal_—she laid it in its folder on the topmost corner of her desk and scribbled the appointment into her datebook. The girl didn't say when the men were coming by, so it was likely that Melissa would forget due to the kind of the day she was having.

_Students_, she groaned to herself.

Looking around her office, she decided to tidy up before anyone was likely to walk in. Shutting the door, she straightened the papers crammed in the filing cabinet, rearranged the plants sitting atop a small table near the window, and cleared the boxes resting haphazardly in the chairs positioned by the door. When she was done, Melissa began piling folders on top of each other in the drawers making up one side of her desk, hoping to clear off enough space to make it seem as if she wasn't as scattered today as she felt.

Just as she had placed the last of her loose pages in a spot she was unlikely to find again, a knock came. Straightening up, Melissa tugged on her cardigan and tightened her ponytail before opening the door. Unfortunately, what she saw standing in the hallway was… nothing.

"Hello?" she asked uncertainly, glancing both ways down the deserted corridor.

Silence answered her, causing Melissa to shrug. _Maybe I'm imagining things._

Turning around, she shut the door to her office and took a seat behind the desk, looking around for what might have happened to the coffee mug she had placed on top of the table near the window that morning. Finally finding it precariously balanced on one of the arms of the chair nearest her, Melissa got up and headed toward it. Before she could reach out and touch the handle, however, the cup teetered to one side, falling to the floor in a loud crash. _Great_. _Just what I need_.

Gathering the pieces with her hands, Melissa dumped them in the closest trash can and used the doorknob to pull herself to her feet. As she stood, her knees cracked unpleasantly. _I'm getting too old for this_.

Suddenly, a pound on the other side of the door caused her to jump. Yanking it open, she saw that she had once again been victimized by the phantom knocker. As she took a deep breath, she stood for a minute, hoping that one of her students would come out of the woodwork to apologize. Today was not a day for fun and games.

Instead, nothing happened. Sighing, Melissa grabbed her keys and the pink post-it telling whoever came by that she would be back in ten minutes, then locked her office and tacked the note in place before heading down the hall to one of the many teacher's lounges. She needed a cup of coffee—or twenty.

Making her way down the empty corridor, the heels of her boots collided with the linoleum, echoing off the walls. It wasn't abnormal for her to be alone on the second floor of the English building. Most classes that were held inside took place on the ground level, while most of the professors preferred offices on the other side of campus—only because some of the rooms had been newly renovated and had their own thermostat. Melissa had been offered one of the redecorated offices, but declined. She preferred to stay where she was. Room 205 gave her luck, and she wanted to keep it that way.

Making her way into the lounge, she saw that the pot of coffee she had put on this morning was still full, but the warmer had long since burned out. Pouring herself a cup into a Styrofoam eight-ouncer, she opened the door to the microwave sitting on top of the small refrigerator and hit the two on the panel. The machine sprung to life with a peaceful hum, the tray inside spinning slowly.

By the time the microwave beeped, she could hear the sound of footsteps making their way down the hallway. Grabbing the hot cup with a fist full of napkins, she shut the door and walked hastily out of the lounge. Before she could turn the corner to get a view of her office, however, a pale, cold hand appeared out of nowhere, grasping for her neck. Jumping backwards, steaming coffee spilled onto her hands, and Melissa dropped the Styrofoam in surprise. Looking up from the spatter on the ground, she saw a woman with scraggly hair, a wild stare, and white-gray skin glaring determinedly into her eyes.

"What…"

The woman—or rather, ghost—smiled, then grabbed for Melissa again. This time, she found herself up against the wall beside the door to the room she had just abandoned, the spirit's fingers closing in on her throat. "This isn't… possible…"

Suddenly, the sound of footsteps racing toward her echoed against the wall, and two figures appeared in the corner of her eye. The spirit's grip tightened as the men approached, followed by a snarl, as if to let them know that this one was hers. The throaty growl wasn't enough to stop them, however, and as the pair got closer, she could see why.

The figures belong to two men—both tall, though one taller—dressed in the federal uniform of a black and white suit. As the taller one slowed, his eyes searching for something on the ground, Melissa could see that the shorter one had retrieved a gun from the belt of his pants—an aluminum-plated 9mm just like the one Jerry kept in their den back at home.

"Drop her!" His voice was deep and commanding, yet the spirit didn't relent. Glancing from him to the woman, Melissa saw that the spirits eyes were now focused on the man and narrowed into slits. "I said let her go, bitch!"

Then, just as suddenly as she appeared, the woman was gone in a wisp of smoke. A second later, Melissa found herself on the ground, staring up at the two men. In the taller one's hand was a metal rod that looked as though it had been yanked from the handle of the oven inside the lounge behind her. At her glance toward the makeshift weapon, the man grinned awkwardly and tossed the bar aside, then offered a hand to help her to her feet.

"Thank you," Melissa said calmly, shifting her gaze from him to his partner. The shorter man had stowed his weapon and was now straightening the lapels of his jacket. "I'm assuming you're the two men who are supposed to be coming to see me? I must say, you have impeccable timing."

"So we've been told," the shorter one smirked.

"And who are you, exactly?" Melissa asked, nodding toward her office and leading the way down the corridor.

"I'm Agent Scott. This is my partner—"

Melissa laughed. "I'm gonna stop you right there. While you're dressed like Feds, you certainly have the training of something else. I don't know many agents that could take down a ghost in that way."

"Well, we picked up a few things on the way," the shorter one replied dryly.

"I'm sure." Turning to toward the door, Melissa shot a glimpse at them from the corner of her eye and grinned before inserting her key into the lock. At the satisfying click, she twisted the handle and pushed it open, then stood aside to let them pass. When they were all inside, Melissa shut the door again and rounded to her desk as the two sat in the chairs across from her. "Look, you don't have to be straight with me, but if you want me to be straight with you, it's going to have to go both ways. I know you're not Feds. They would have fired the gun and hoped for the best. You knew that wouldn't work and waited for something that would have. Plus, the two of you are too young."

The taller one cleared his throat and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, sending his partner a furtive glance. The shorter one bit his lip and took a moment before nodding, in which the taller one returned. "My name is Sam, and this is my brother, Dean."

_Brothers. _Now that she looked at them, she could see the similarities in their features. The taller one, Sam, had the same cleft chin and green eyes as Dean—though the latter's gaze was large, solid, and expressive whereas his brother's was soft and slight. They also had the same muscular build, though Sam had a few inches on Dean, making him look thinner.

Smirking to herself, Melissa tapped her finger absently on the hard oak tabletop in front of her. "Alright. And what are you doing here?"

"We're working," Sam answered, sending his brother another meaningful glance. "Trying to solve the murder cases of Jessica Welby and Terri Sanders. We think it might be something… _abnormal_ going after these women."

"Abnormal like ghosts?" Melissa asked, though she already knew the answer. At Sam's nod, she sighed. "Doesn't surprise me. It's about that time."

"Time for what?" Dean asked, tugging on his earlobe. "Are you saying this has happened before?"

Melissa shook her head and sighed. "Not strictly speaking, no. But there is a reason it's started up. A reason not many people have been able to put together since information on the goings-on inside the building have been hard to discover. The only reason I have been able to do so is through perseverance and contacts, and even then, I have nothing short of personal ramblings. It's the 70th anniversary, don't you know?"

"But why are you looking into the building in the first place?" Sam asked.

"Isn't it obvious? There's a great conspiracy to uncover," Melissa grinned. "At first, it started out as research for the class I teach, but it soon became something more. As soon as I started looking further, I stumbled upon some of the staff's writings, and realized that there were truths to dig up—death being a heavy theme. Supernatural things, ghosts, witches, whatever you can imagine, they're real and they're out there, and they live in the deepest foundations of the building. Of course, though, I'm sure you already knew that."

Dean smirked toward the ground and scratched at the back of his neck. "I'd say so."

"What do you know of the hospital?" Melissa asked, leaning forward, her eyes flickering between the two brothers.

At her question, Sam bit his lip while Dean tugged on his earlobe. Eventually, the former spoke. "A few things: when it was built, what it was used for, and the fact that there was a hanging on the top floor."

"Interesting choice of words," Melissa nodded, feeling herself slip into the voice she often used whenever lecturing her students, the one that told them she knew something she wanted them to work out on their own. "I notice you didn't say 'suicide' so much as you made it sound as if it wasn't."

"That's because I don't think it was," Sam said, feeding into her tone. "I think she was murdered."

Melissa smiled and nodded fervently, much like she would whenever someone answered a question properly. "Exactly what had me headed down the path of discovery. You see, boys, Elizabeth Sloan wasn't hung in room 502 like everyone thought. In fact, the story that the staff fed the police was completely manufactured. Elizabeth hung, no doubt about it, from the rafters of the room, but she didn't do so of her own accord…"

She let the words hang there for a minute while Sam and Dean exchanged a meaningful glance—one that looked as if Sam was indicating to his brother that he had been right about something while Dean rolled his eyes. After a moment of quiet, Melissa reached forward to grab the folder she had placed on the corner of her desk and flipped it open before beginning the story she had told only once before through the pen and paper of the book she had been working on for close to ten years:

"It was June 18, 1936, almost seventy years ago to this day, when the fateful incident 'went down', if you will. Elizabeth Sloan, who had worked her way up from measly maid to head nurse in a matter of several years, was overseeing a routine cleaning on the top floor. The level had been cleared out with some of the healthier patients heading down to the grounds for an hour or so of fresh air while the women worked.

"As they scoured the floors, wiped off the countertops, and changed the sheets, Elizabeth was doing some work of her own. There had been a married doctor she was particularly infatuated with, had even been seeing behind his wife's back, and up until that day, they had been staying far away from each other to keep things under wraps. But it seemed as if something had changed inside Elizabeth that morning, something she couldn't keep to herself any longer. The woman, accordingly, was pregnant and wanted the man to know he was the person responsible for fathering the child.

"Heading down to the first floor, Elizabeth went to talk to Dr. Samuel Edwards, to tell him the news, but he disregarded her, thinking it was something he should do to keep their story from surfacing. Finally, she backed him into the corner of the autopsy room, where they were alone aside from the corpse laying atop the table, and told him the news. He didn't take it well, seeing as he had just had a child with his wife Shelly, who was also a nurse at the hospital, and hadn't planned on fathering any more until he was ready.

"Bursting out of the room, the man went to gather his wife and head home before Elizabeth could tell Shelly what had been going on for months behind her back. As he made his way up the stairs to the fifth floor to find her, Elizabeth had gone to the kitchens to retrieve the makings of a spell she had been working on for weeks since discovering she was pregnant: a binding curse.

"As the woman worked, and as the doctor went to get Shelly, many members of the staff were curious as to what had put both Samuel and Elizabeth in such a fuss. In their eyes, the two people hadn't talked much aside from a hello from time to time, so to see them split ways from the morgue and head into separate directions in a huff was strange.

"A particularly nosy nurse, Mrs. Rebecca Sanders, stood near the front desk to discuss her theory on what was happening. Another woman, this one of the cleaning crew, said that she hadn't seen either person so angry in the time that they had been working there. Deciding to investigate, Rebecca and the woman, who wishes to go by the name of Paula in my writings, went toward the kitchen to spy on Elizabeth, only to discover that she was doing nothing more than crushing something exceptionally odd-smelling in a mortar.

"Ten minutes later, when the two women were due to be off break, Rebecca walked into the kitchen in an attempt to make it seem as if she was doing nothing more than looking for something to eat. Instead, she stumbled upon Elizabeth chanting over an open flame, throwing dashes of whatever odorous ingredients she had been mashing with the pestle into the fire. As soon as Rebecca walked in, the flames grew to five feet, nearly hitting the ceiling, before extinguishing completely upon Elizabeth's broken concentration.

"Turning around, Rebecca fled and found Paula, who was holed up in what we would call a janitor's closet. The two women discussed what Rebecca saw, eventually landing upon the theory that she was a witch. There had been rumors about it before then, especially when some of the other nurses who had angered Elizabeth suddenly became ill with the disease they had been attempting to cure, but nothing that could be proven. This, in their eyes, was as good enough proof as any.

"Deciding to warn Samuel and Shelly of what was happening, Rebecca went up to the top floor using the elevator shaft—which mysteriously became unfixable that same day—and found them in the middle of a heated discussion. Figuring that what she had to say was more important that what the two were arguing over, Rebecca interjected and told the couple what she saw. Unfortunately, Rebecca was met with dubious looks and a bark of amusement.

"Retreating down the hall, Rebecca returned to cleaning without another glance at the pair. In the ten minutes since warning the Edwards, Nurse Sloan had finished concocting the spell she was planning to use and was now in the stage of directing it toward Samuel. Paula, who had been listening at the door, became frightened and decided it was time for her own attempt to notify the couple. Her endeavor, however, was thwarted.

"By the time Paula got to the top floor, both Elizabeth and Rebecca were there—one standing in the doorway of a patient's room while the other faced the couple, I'm not sure which was which. Samuel and Shelly were bickering outside of room 502, having just unveiled the relationship that had been going on in secret for quite some time, and Shelly was heatedly trying to find a way for everything to be Elizabeth's fault. Not many people were a fan of Nurse Sloan, giving Shelly the impression that it would be easy to turn the entire staff against the head nurse to the point where Elizabeth would want to quit and leave Shelly and Samuel alone in wedded bliss for good.

"Ultimately, though, that's not what happened. While Shelly was discussing with her husband the horrible things she was planning to do to Elizabeth Sloan, the woman was listening into the conversation and trying to find the perfect moment to release her spell. Rebecca watched as Elizabeth continued to chant until there was a break in discussion and the entire top floor of the hospital turned a bright red, eventually consuming Samuel Edwards—whether that was part of the spell or not, I still don't know.

"Enraged at the disappearance of her husband, Shelly leapt onto Elizabeth and the fifth level soon became a wrestling match. Even though things like that are more accepted now, it wasn't a common sight back then, and Rebecca and Paula found themselves stunned at what they were seeing, rendering them unable to help. After a few minutes of the two woman scratching and screaming at one another, Rebecca and Paula snapped out of their stupor before pulling the two off each other. By that time, the noise had attracted an audience at the landing of the stairs, but Elizabeth threw up a barrier to keep anyone from crossing into the hallway. The only ones allowed to be there were Shelly, Elizabeth, Rebecca, and Paula.

"Shelly and Elizabeth continued to square off verbally before eventually Shelly tried to walk away, but got caught in the barrier keeping her there. Angered, she yelled at Elizabeth to let her go, but the woman did nothing more than smile and continue to taunt her. This infuriated Shelly into attacking again, pushing Elizabeth into room 502 where there was nothing inside except for a stripped-down bed and the sheets that had been taken off of it.

"After a few more minutes of sparring, and this is where the story becomes confused with its fictitious counterpart, Shelly either used the loose sheets to create a noose or Elizabeth manipulated them into becoming such. Either way, Rebecca and Paula came into the room to discover Elizabeth swinging from the rafters, still cursing Shelly, who was clutching her raw neck, and chanting. Right before she died, the top floor illuminated in red again and Elizabeth commented that their blood would be her resurrection.

"Thinking nothing of it aside from an empty threat, Shelly went to check on the frozen crowd near the stairs and discovered that they were able to move again. Among the handful of people was her husband, and Shelly disregarded telling anyone of what happened inside 502 in lieu of reuniting with Samuel. Rebecca and Paula, on the other hand, reiterated the events to one of the doctors, with some of the details edited out. By the time the cops came, which took awhile, the story had become something else entirely—a story of a woman distressed by her unwed pregnancy who took her own life while the floor was deserted.

"After the investigation ceased, with the cops finding nothing that would suggest foul play—since they didn't have the technology we have now—Rebecca, taking Elizabeth's words seriously, went to the records office and destroyed all the files on Elizabeth Sloan before quitting her job and heading out of town. Paula, on the other hand, continued to work there, careful to keep everyone out of room 502 since there was clearly a dark presence inside. The room, which was even documented as such in the police reports, had become thick with something angry, and everyone that went inside was in danger. It was soon closed off and deemed out-of-bounds to everyone in the hospital.

"Shelly Edwards, however, didn't take the warnings seriously. She had returned to work a week after the death of Elizabeth, coming back as if nothing more had happened aside from a simple fight, and continued working there for a few years before reentering the scene of the crime. At that time, everyone in the hospital knew that Shelly was pregnant with her second child with Samuel, and Shelly was determined to prove _something_—I don't know what—to Elizabeth's spirit. She entered the room and never came out. Her body was found in the courtyard a few minutes later, her neck twisted around from colliding with the ground after falling five stories. Above, the bars on the window were swung open, clear that she had either jumped or been pushed from room 502.

"When the hospital was closed off, the stories of the two women tapered off into two entirely different tales, eventually losing itself in fiction. After hearing accounts from my grandparents, who had been friends with some of the people who had worked inside the building, I was intrigued into discovering the real truth and publishing a novel about it. Unfortunately, I was unable to speak to more than one person before they died, but that one person lead me to many more—one of them even being my cousin's great-aunt, Paula."

Silence swelled as the brothers let the words soak in. After a moment, the two exchanged meaningful glances before Sam turned toward her. "The woman that was there, Paula, was your cousin's great-aunt?" Rebecca nodded as Sam sighed. "Do you know where Elizabeth Sloan was buried?"

"It says here that she was unceremoniously dumped somewhere on the grounds, but the whereabouts aren't exact."

"Okay," Sam said, his eyes scanning the room in thought. "It's obvious that the spirit is going after living family members of the people she had trapped with her on the fifth floor. Terri Sanders, who was related to Rebecca Sanders, and you and Jessica Welby, who're distantly related to this Paula woman."

"Yeah, and she already attacked you once," Dean piped up, his eyes falling into Melissa, "and I doubt getting hit with some iron is gonna stop her for long."

"But what if she doesn't come back?" Melissa asked.

"She will," Sam answered, his tone serious, causing Melissa to clam up.

"What are you proposing, then? That I lock myself up until she's due to stop?"

Dean smirked at her phrasing. "Doesn't sound like a bad idea. Your head's on the chopping block and me and Sammy have to get it off. We can't exactly play watchdog while we're hunting her down."

"Is there anywhere you can go that's populated—a restaurant, a store, something? Sometimes spirits won't show up if there are people around. They like to attack when its one-on-one," Sam said, biting his lip.

"There's a diner my husband likes to frequent near the Daze Inn motel," Melissa answered with a sigh, "but it's not all that populated."

"It's good enough," Sam answered. "We're about to head that way, so we'll give you a ride. Once you're inside, though, you have to _stay _inside."

Melissa nodded in agreement, then shut the folder in front of her to tuck back inside the filing cabinet she had retrieved it from before grabbing her purse off the table near the window. "Alright. I'm ready."


	12. Chapter Eleven

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

ELEVEN

Waverly Hill Sanitarium  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Tuesday, June 20, 2006  
>4:24 PM<p>

"**D**ean," Sam said finally, sliding out of the freshly-dug grave he and his brother had been working on and tossing his shovel aside. "She's not here."

"What d'you mean, 'she's not here'? She has to be," Dean groaned, shoveling aside another mound of dirt and wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. "The professor said she was probably buried in an unmarked grave on the grounds. There are only _two_ unmarked graves, Sammy, and the first one was a bust. This one has to be the jackpot."

Sam took a minute to consider Dean's words. It was true; Professor Dyer had told them on the way to the Daze Inn Diner that Elizabeth Sloan was most likely interred in an unmarked grave near the train tracks at the bottom of the hill, but she had made a point to emphasize "most likely"—meaning she wasn't sure. Dean, however, seemed to take it the opposite way and interpreted the woman's words to mean that she was almost certain the nurse had been buried there.

After dropping Professor Dyer off at the diner, then changing into more hunt-appropriate clothes and picking up a few supplies from their room, Dean had taken them straight to the sanitarium and promptly began searching for the area the professor had indicated—which had been an easy find considering there were only two there and both of them were significantly blank. Dropping his bag and taking off his plaid overshirt, Dean had begun shoveling, giving Sam a dirty look when he realized his brother hadn't joined in. Sam had expressed his concerns about this being nothing but a waste of time, but Dean wouldn't hear it. Just like with everything else, when Dean made the decision, it was final, so Sam had reluctantly began digging alongside his older brother.

The first grave had been empty with nothing but a decayed casket underneath rock-hard dirt, which had taken a long time to break through. At the discovery, Sam had shot his brother an I-told-you-so glare before climbing out and gazing up at the sanitarium. Dean had taken a moment to do the same before deciding to start on the second grave, even though Sam knew they wouldn't find anything different than they had with the first.

Suddenly, the sound of wood splintering came as Dean plowed the pointed end of his shovel into the aged wood of the coffin under his feet. Glancing down at the hole, Sam could see a skeleton through the cracks of the lid, and as Dean continued to destroy it, it became obvious that these remains didn't belong to the person they were looking for.

"Not her," Sam sighed, getting to his feet.

"What? How do you know?"

"Female skeletons have a wider pelvis bone than we do," Sam answered, his eyes scanning the remains, which only had the remnants of a few articles of clothing: a shirt, shoes, and a pair of tattered pants that hung low. "Plus, the shoulders are wider."

"You can tell all that from there, huh?" Dean asked, his skepticism obvious.

"Well, no. But what I can see is _that_ right around his finger. Simple gold band, wide. Not something a woman often wears," Sam said, jumping down to pick up the piece of jewelry he was appraising. The metal had been soiled over the years, but it still held the same shape and size of a normal wedding ring. Flipping it over, Sam peered at the engraving inside. "Huh."

"What?"

"'Forever, Shelly,'" Sam read, then handed it to Dean. "I think this skeleton belongs to Dr. Edwards."

"Wonder what happened to him," Dean frowned, pocketing the band. "Anyway, I'm lighting the not-so-good doctor up for good measure. Don't want to take any chances."

Sam sighed and clambered out of the hole. "Yeah, alright. Just don't use all the lighter fluid. We'll need some for when we actually _find_ Elizabeth Sloan's remains."

"Yeah, yeah," Dean said, waving his brother off before climbing out of the grave and retrieving the salt from the duffle bag he had carried with him down the hill.

While Dean worked, Sam glared up at the sanitarium. Even from where he stood down by the train tracks, he could feel the pulsating anxiety the _Timor Animi_ cast over him and his brother—though Dean was making a job of trying to prove that the sensation wasn't bothering him and that their prolonged exhuming hadn't been an attempt to delay going inside.

As they had made their way up the sloping drive that lead to the hospital, Sam could tell that the _Animi_ had gotten stronger since their last trip there, as if feeding off of the death of the detective and the girl. Getting out of the car, Sam had shivered once as a tremor ran down his spine, before following Dean and his concerned look down the hill.

The spark of a match caught Sam's attention as Dean lit the book he was holding and waited for the flames to engulf one another before tossing it into the pit. There was a sudden audible roar as the blaze caught the lighter fluid-soaked clothes of the corpse and the brothers stood beside each other as they watched the fire lick the dirt siding of the grave. After a few moments, the orange and red glow simmered to a steady flicker and Dean looked up at Sam.

"I guess we have to go inside that thing now," Dean sighed, gathering the duffle bag and its contents that had been littered around his feet.

Sam smirked at his brother's words, but said nothing as they began their trek uphill. By the time they reached the back entrance of the building, it was obvious to both of them that something about the hospital was wrong. The _Timor Animi_ had become placid, turning into nothing but a dull beat of unease.

As Dean reached for the door handle, Sam could tell that his brother was suspicious of the lack of activity by the pause of his hand upon the knob. Yanking it open, a cold breeze flew past them before, suddenly, the two were pulled inside and thrown to the floor just as the door slammed shut behind them.

"Should've seen that coming," Dean groaned, propping himself up on one elbow and shooting an appraising glance at Sam.

Sam frowned in response. "Guess she couldn't wait."

"Okay. But why?" Dean asked, getting to his feet and helping his brother up.

Shrugging, Sam said, "Probably because we robbed her of killing Professor Dyer."

Dean sighed and looked around the emptiness of the first floor atrium. The dimness of the room seemed thicker than usual, as did the air. Though all the windows were smashed out and there was more than one door leading to the outside—though only one of them had an actual door in its frame—Sam couldn't help but feel strangely claustrophobic.

Pushing the thought away, Sam waited for Dean to hand him a clip of wrought-iron rounds to change out the ones in his 9mm. As he did so, Dean deposited the normal bullets back in his duffle, then pulled out a shotgun and two flashlights.

"I think we should split up," Dean said finally, handing his brother the police-grade Maglite. "You check down here and I'll check upstairs since you can't make it to the fifth floor. I don't want to stick around inside here for long, especially after the yanking."

"Hold on. Are you sure that's a good idea?" Sam asked, grabbing his brother's arm just as he was about to turn away. "The last time we did that, I almost killed you with your own gun."

"Yeah, well, try not to get possessed," Dean smirked, clapping his hand on his brother's shoulder before turning and heading toward the stairs. Pausing half-way up to the second floor, Dean leaned over the railing, his duffle clanging against the metal, and grinned. "And, uh, yell if any ghosts start whispering to you or whatever."

Before Sam could respond, Dean was gone. Turning on heel, Sam groaned and headed toward the front entrance, fully aware that Dean's vibrato was to cover up the fact that his brother was actually worried. He had been doing the same thing since they were kids: whenever things got sticky, Dean began picking on Sam in order to make it seem as though he was oblivious to the situation.

Passing the door, Sam could see the Impala parked outside and the vast gravel lot that surrounded it. From inside, the barren landscape looked inviting and spacious, but Sam turned his thoughts away from their car and toward the task at hand. They had to find remains—hopefully the corpse—of Elizabeth Sloan before she could go after the descendants of anyone else who might've been distantly related to the women who hung her. Sam knew, though, that that was going to be tricky. The professor said that the woman was buried somewhere on the grounds, which could mean anywhere from inside the hospital to back down by the train tracks. Finding her was going to be time-consuming at the least.

Starting in the empty room on the opposite side of the morgue, Sam began pounding his fists against the walls, looking for an inconsistency in the sheetrock. By the time he had finished searching—his hands feeling numb after slamming them endlessly against the hard surface—he found himself face-to-face with the swinging doors of the mortuary and sighed.

_Here we go_.

* * *

><p>Dean stomped his feet and knocked his knuckles against the wall as he searched for a hidden room or cubby hole somewhere in the depths of the second floor. During their first trip there, Sam and Dean had overlooked this level due to the fact that it seemed unstable, but now realized that looks had been deceiving. Though there were holes in the floor—where Dean could see Sam below him, though he doubted his brother knew that—there had been nothing to suggest that it was going to collapse beneath him. Even after stamping his steel-toed boots against the cement with as much weight as he could muster, the ground held strong.<p>

After clearing the second level, he moved onto the third, doing more of the same despite the fact that his feet were throbbing from the force in which he was pounding them. As he reached the end of the first hallway, the sound of Sam's voice echoed up the stairwell at the mouth of the corridor, causing Dean to pause. "DEAN!"

Knowing the panic in his brother's voice, Dean abandoned his station between the doors of room 312 and 314 to race down to the ground floor. Reaching the last stair, he finally saw what had Sam sounding so alarmed. Standing in front of his brother was the ghost of who he could only guess to be Elizabeth Sloan: straggly brown hair, tattered clothes, and a hand pinning Sam by his neck to the wall nearest the front entrance.

Loudly dropping the duffle bag from his shoulder in an attempt to get the spirit's attention, he waited for the woman to whip around. When it didn't happen, he rolled his eyes and tried again just as she tightened her grip on Sam.

"Hey!" he called, cocking his shotgun and holding it ready. Finally, the spirit dropped his brother and whipped around to growl at him, her teeth bared in a feral grin. "That's more like it." A second later, Elizabeth blinked in and out of sight before reappearing in front of Dean. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger and watched the spirit evaporate in a hazy cloud of smoke. "Eat salt, bitch."

Coughing, Sam used the wall to pull himself to his feet and rubbed at his throat. "Thanks."

"What happened to your gun?" Dean asked, his eyes scanning the ground for the aluminum-plated 9mm Sam had taken from him before heading down the hill to the small cemetery below the sanitarium.

"Knocked it out of my hands," Sam answered, heading in the opposite direction of Dean's eyes to pick up the pistol that had skidded toward the doors to the morgue. "She's strong, man. I didn't even see her coming."

"Well this isn't the first time a spirit's got the jump on you," Dean smirked. At Sam's aggravated look, he cleared his throat and changed the subject. "You find anything down here?"

"Yeah, actually," Sam answered as Dean neared him, excitement betraying his calm tone. "I think it's the reason she attacked me, to be honest."

"What is?"

Reaching behind him, Sam retrieved a book about the same size as Dad's journal—but that was the only thing the two had in common. The black leather cover was warped and cracked, and the pages between were yellowed and water-stained; on the spine was a monogrammed E.S. in faded gold letters.

_ Sammy's done it again._

Smiling to himself, Dean watched as his brother flipped open the book and pulled out a silver necklace, which he then wrapped around his thumb and palm for Dean to see the charm at the end. Taking a look at it, Dean saw nothing that stuck out to him. The trinket appeared to be a large, flat Y with an extra leg in the middle. "What is it?"

Sam sighed and unraveled the necklace from around his hand. "You ever hear of the Necro Cross?"

"Is that like some kind of morbid motocross?"

"No," Sam groaned, shooting his brother a glare. "Dude, do you ever crack open a book or do you just wait for me to—"

"Yeah, whatever. Get to the point."

Groaning again, this time with an added eye roll, Sam squared his shoulders and said, "A Necro Cross has been used by witches for decades as a means to ward of reapers. If they keep this hidden in a place they have some sort of attachment to, it keeps their spirit around until their body is salt and burned. Most of the time, they use it if they have some kind of revenge they're hoping to exact and don't think they'll be able to finish while they're alive. Sometimes they wait decades for someone to enter their haunt before starting up where they left off. All it takes is a little blood of someone related to the intended victim."

"So you're thinking this Elizabeth chick knew she was going to meet her maker before she could get the word out about her and Dr. Edwards?" Dean asked with a frown. "Man, this must have been some angry bitch to want to use that kind of mojo."

"She _was _angry," Sam nodded, flipping a few pages in the diary. "I was reading some of this before her spirit showed up. Apparently the woman wasn't just pregnant with Dr. Edwards' kid, but the kid was a byproduct of rape, and that was the foundation that started their tumultuous relationship."

"Stand up guy," Dean muttered, shaking his head. "And she got the noose for it."

"Well, actually," Sam said, his eyes focused and scanning back and forth. "It says here that the day she found out she was pregnant with Samuel's child, she tried anything and everything short of abortion to get rid of it—apparently abortion was against her religious beliefs. One day, in the midst of her anger, she went to see a friend of a friend who introduced her to witchcraft. Ultimately, though, there wasn't a spell to get rid of a baby."

"But I bet she learned a few tricks along the way," Dean commented.

"I'd say. There are spells written in the margins—some of them are pretty dangerous, too. Like the binding spell she used the day she died."

"Let me ask you something," Dean said, glancing at the Necro Cross in Sam's hand. "Can that thing resurrect someone?"

"I'm not sure," Sam answered with a frown. "Why? What're you thinking?"

"Well, it's just the way these girls died. First one's body doesn't get found, then the second one turns into a corpse. It's like in _The Mummy _when that dude is resurrected and starts killing people until he's whole again."

"Maybe," Sam shrugged. "This place does seem to be feeding off of the death of the girls. The _Timor Animi_ is definitely stronger. I guess the same could be said for her spirit."

"Yeah, well, I don't want to give her any more juice than she's already got by sitting around here and twiddling our thumbs or whatever. Let's find her corpse and torch it before we have ourselves a dead professor to add to the pile," Dean said, then nodded toward the stairs. "If you're done down here, I'm pretty sure we can get the top floors cleared faster working together. I'll even let you stand guard on the fifth if you play nice."

"Whatever," Sam said, rolling his eyes at Dean's sly grin. "Let's go."


	13. Chapter Twelve

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

TWELVE

Waverly Hill Sanitarium  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Tuesday, June 20, 2006  
>7:05 PM<p>

**D**ean stood at the mouth of the corridor leading to room 502, anticipation and anxiety causing tension in his shoulders as he stared down the long, dirty hallway. Sam was holding down the fort at the landing of the stairs, having already tested his limits and froze a few feet from where Dean was now standing. Taking the shotgun, he had positioned himself at the ready by the railing, even though Dean knew that if something were to go down, they would both be on their own thanks to the _Timor Animi_ and its effects on Sam.

After searching the rest of the third and fourth floors and finding nothing, Dean had wanted to immediately head up to 502—he had a sneaking suspicion that the thing they were searching for was contained within the walls of the room—but Sam had other ideas. Making a pit stop back at the Impala, his brother had crammed his jean pockets full of salt-packed shotgun shells and matches. Checking the inside of the duffle bag and seeing that it was almost filled to the brim with everything they needed, Dean had asked Sam what he needed those for, only to get a glare in response. Shrugging it off, they had immediately headed up to the fifth floor and waited for the _Animi_ to stop Sam in place. After freeing him, Dean took a breath and eyed the hallway, not really wanting to head down it. He had a feeling something dangerous was about to happen.

"Any time now," Sam groaned, repositioning his hands on the barrel of the shotgun.

"Yeah, yeah," Dean muttered, rolling his eyes.

Taking a step forward, Dean clenched his teeth and waited for an attack. When nothing happened, he continued on until he was in the threshold of room 502. As soon as he was inside, he began kicking and pounding at the walls just like he and Sam had been doing on the floors below, until eventually…

"Got something," Dean said as soon as his foot collided with a hollow sound.

"What is it?"

Ignoring his brother, Dean turned around and used the bottom of his boot to kick through the wall. At the satisfying crunch of aged wood splintering, he about-faced and kneeled down to begin pulling out the rest of the debris. By the time he was done, the smell of decades-old dirt was strong in the room.

"Dean? You okay?" Sam asked, his voice sounding worried.

"I'm fine. Just give me a minute."

Silence fell after that as Dean pulled the flashlight from his back pocket and pointed it inside the hole. A brown, fragile-looking skeleton stared back at him, its eyeless sockets fixed blankly on him and causing him to recoil. "Jesus."

Suddenly, two heavy hands clasped around Dean's shoulder and pulled him to his feet. Attempting to turn around, he struggled against the grip and heard the throaty growl of Elizabeth Sloan. "I was wondering when you were going to show up."

Using all of his weight, Dean bent forward and freed himself from her grasp, then rolled into a somersault until eventually landing on his feet. The duffle bag—now hanging around his elbow—clanged and clattered as he pulled it open to retrieve the spare sawed-off. Holding it at the ready, he aimed the barrel toward the blinking spirit before firing. Unfortunately, the woman had disappeared before the hollow boom of the shotgun sounded.

_She won't be gone long_, Dean said to himself as he dropped the duffle to the floor and held the shotgun in the crook of his arm. As soon as he repositioned himself on the ground, she was back, this time her eyes flaring red in anger.

"I was w—"

Before he could finish the sentence, the weapon was pulled free from his hand and hitting the wall to his left. The two colliding caused the sawed-off to fire another round, rock salt spraying everywhere. Blinking away the sting of the pellets, Dean looked around the room and saw that he was once again alone.

Chuckling to himself, he bent down to retrieve the cylinder of salt, the rest of the lighter fluid, and his last pack of matches from the bag. Holding them tight in his hands in case Elizabeth decided to relieve him of the things he needed, he headed toward the hole in the wall he had created and bent down.

"Let's see you try to stop me now, bitch," Dean challenged as he doused the corpse with the Kingsford, then sprinkled with salt.

As he was about to light the match, however, a strong gust of wind began to swirl around the room, blowing Dean to the ground from his crouched position. Getting to his knees, he looked around for the book he had lost and found it in the opposite corner—with a pair of bare, filthy feet standing between him and it. "Son of a bitch."

The words barely escaped his mouth before Elizabeth's hands found themselves around Dean's throat. As Elizabeth pulled him to his feet again, Dean tried to get a solid grip on the woman's dress, but found his fingers went through it like Jell-o.

_Duh. She's a spirit_.

A second later, his back hit the wall behind him, the sheetrock crumbling beneath his shoulder blades. Letting out a groan of pain, Dean could hear Sam calling his name from the stairwell, but could barely make out anything else his brother was saying over the strong gusts of wind filling his ears.

Reaching into his jeans, where he had stowed a single shotgun shell, Dean blindly felt for the round before finding it embedded in the corner of his pocket. Retrieving it, he held it overhead with two hands and removed the cap. Salt sprinkled down onto Elizabeth's dirty head, causing her to blink out once again—the wind disappearing with her.

"Dean! You alright?" Sam called from down the hallway, his voice echoing off the walls. "What's going on?"

Deciding not to answer—which he knew would infuriate his brother—Dean snapped out of his momentary trance to sprint toward the side of the room containing his matches. Ripping a few free of their binding, he struck them against the strip on the back and threw the whole pack into the alcove he had created. The body was engulfed in flames in a matter of seconds, but Dean didn't feel the instant relief he always felt whenever burning a body. In fact, it seemed the _Timor Animi _was reacting negatively to the fire licking its home and was now pushing its weight onto Dean.

"Dean!" Sam yelled, sounding choked.

Getting up from his crouched position, Dean leaned into the hallway, using the doorjamb to hold onto under the heaviness of the angered sensation. Sam was near the stairwell, surrounded by a ring of salt and empty shells, his body on all fours with dry coughs heaving from his chest. In Dean's own upper body, he could feel something restricting his breathing, as though an invisible hand had a grip on his lungs. "Sammy!"

The call came out like a whisper as his throat, now suddenly dry, attempted to shout for his brother. Using as much strength as he could muster, despite the fact that his limbs felt like he was walking through thigh-deep water, Dean treaded his way over to Sam and attempted to pull him into a standing position. Sam held onto his older brother, his grip on Dean's arm causing small bruises to form under his fingertips.

"What's going on?" Dean asked.

"I think you pissed it off," Sam coughed. "What happened in there?"

"I salted and burned her."

"You found her body?"

"Yeah. It was in the walls. Why?"

Sam waved off his brother and let go of Dean with one hand to reach into the back waistband of his jeans. A second later, the diary and necklace appeared in front of him and Sam shoved them both into Dean's absently awaiting hands. "I don't have time to explain. You just have to burn this."

"Can you move?" Dean asked as white noise began to build in his ears. "Sam?"

Shaking his head, Sam shouted something in return, but Dean couldn't hear it. Static, like that of an off-air television set, was growing louder and louder inside Dean's head. Nodding, he helped Sam lower himself to the ground with his free hand before clasping the journal close to his chest and wading his way back to room 502.

As soon as he was inside, he could see that the fire was still burning, though nothing more than small embers now, having engulfed the delicate corpse in a matter of seconds. Holding his breath against the smoke, as well as holding onto hope that the cinders would be enough, Dean crouched, tossed the two objects onto the pile, and waited for the fire to consume them. When nothing happened, Dean cursed himself for throwing in the entire book of matches and stood upright again to head back to Sam and grab some more.

Suddenly, the white noise became deafening and Dean was forced onto his knees, pushing the heels of his palms into his ears. A moan of pain escaped his mouth, though he couldn't hear it, and Dean unexpectedly wondered if he was going deaf. Pulling one hand away from his head, he slapped the ground as a test, but only felt the vibrations of his palm colliding with the ground.

"Son of a bitch!" Dean shouted. "Enough!"

His words echoed off the walls as the building static ceased. Out of the corner of his eye, Dean could see that the fire had rekindled, the crackling of its flames like music to his ringing ears. A second later and Sam stood in the doorway, a triumphant smile on his face—which Dean returned from the ground.

"Hallelujah," Dean smirked, getting to his feet.

"You can say that again," Sam grinned.

Chuckling, Dean reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the ring he had taken from the grave of Samuel Edwards. Flipping it over in his hands a couple of times to read the inscription once more, he then tossed it into the blaze and watched as the inferno swallowed it whole.

The two stood for a minute, watching listlessly as the flames licked the objects Dean had thrown in before it returned to its slow burn, eventually extinguishing itself in a silent spiral of black smoke. When the fire was out, Dean clapped his hand on his younger brother's shoulder and picked up his bag from the floor.

As the two headed down the stairs, Dean looked out the windows of the floors as they passed. Outside, the sky was darkening into twilight, and when they reached the ground level, the Impala shined from the gravel lot outside, illuminated by the indigo sky.

Throwing his duffle into the backseat, Dean stared at Sam over the roof of his car and smirked. "You know, it's nice."

"What is?"

"Getting back in the game."

Sam smiled and shook his head before sinking into the passenger's side of the car.


	14. Epilogue

Available for download in PDF. I promise you that I don't have any viruses. I just **strongly recommend **it seeing as this was written in book format. Visit the Tumblr dedicated to this series, "11785", for details.

Or just read it here (:

EPILOGUE

Tony's Café at Daze Inn  
>Louisville, Kentucky<br>Wednesday, June 21, 2006  
>8:14 AM<p>

**S**am sat across from Dean, staring blankly into the stack of pancakes he was half-way through devouring. He was starving, especially after the previous night's events at the sanitarium, and hadn't eaten since the morning before. Dean had suggested they stop for a bite, but Sam had quickly pushed the idea away when he reminded his older brother that they had to take Professor Melissa Dyer back home. By that time, the sun had gone down, and though Dean had asked around for the waitress, Kelly, he hadn't gotten much in the way of information as to where she would be and quickly gave up the chase, then escorted the professor to the parking lot, looking crestfallen.

Taking Professor Dyer home had been a task. On the ride back to her house—after relaying only _some_ the events of the evening, despite her persistent questioning—she spoke avidly of a girl named Amy, whom she had met not long ago, that reminded her of Dean.

"Something in the eyes," she said, "a hardness that comes with your line of work."

Sam had been quick to jump on that one and taunted his older brother on the way back to their room, causing Dean to roll his eyes—which garnered him another comment from Sam—and pretend to fall asleep much earlier than he normally would directly after a hunt. Sam, on the other hand, had gone straight to his computer and began searching his theory on what had happened back at Waverly Hill. After reading a few websites that proved his point, Sam waited for Dean to feign waking up an hour later to relay what he knew: the _Timor Animi _had started fighting back after the burning of Elizabeth's body because the anger the woman left behind was being destroyed as well. In response, Dean had just shrugged and muttered something about needing to take a shower, not bothering to listen as Sam continued informing him that the only way the _Animi _could have been obliterated was to wipe out all traces of her existence. Frowning, Sam took it as payback for Dean having to endure half an hour of his teasing on the way back from the Dyer's home in Mockingbird Valley, and had shrugged off his brother's rudeness.

"You telepathically communicating with those pancakes or what?" Dean asked, breaking Sam out of his reverie. "Must be an interesting conversation."

Sam rolled his eyes and sighed, but didn't say anything. Instead, he took a moment to look around the diner. It was packed for a Wednesday morning, but he figured that was due to the sign on the window advertising Endless Waffle Wednesday, which Dean had quickly bought into. Among the five waitresses working, none of them was the brunette Dean had been hoping to see, making his brother look slightly upset. Smirking, Sam looked back down at his plate, but kept his thoughts to himself. He didn't want his brother on his case for asking why he was so interested in a girl that looked at least half a dozen years younger than him.

"So, where to now?" Dean asked, waving his hands in front of his brother's face.

"I thought you wanted to go back to Fort Wayne," Sam frowned.

"Nah," Dean grimaced. "I'm done with this whole on-the-lamb crap. Dad may be right about some things, but if something is seriously out to get us, they'd have found us by now—or at least be looking under every rock until they did." Pausing to take a sip of coffee, Dean cleared his throat. "So I guess you were right all along."

"Wow. Never thought I'd hear you say that," Sam smirked.

"Yeah, well, don't get used to it. Plus, we always seem to fight in Indiana, and I didn't want a repeat of last time."

"I've noticed," Sam grinned, then cleared his throat as he pulled a folded up newspaper from his laptop bag balanced on the seat beside him, placing it on the table in front of his brother. "Since you asked, I found a case up in Green River, Arkansas. Guy gets run over by his own truck. Might be our kind of thing." Dean raised an eyebrow and smiled, causing Sam to frown. "What?"

Laughing, Dean shook his head. "Knew I could count on you to find something weird not even twenty-four hours after we're done working a job."

"Evil never sleeps."

"Neither do you, apparently."

Rolling his eyes, Sam waited for his brother to finish reading the article he had circled with red pen before putting in back in his knapsack. A moment later, Dean was draining his coffee and on his feet.

"So, Green River, Arkansas?" he asked, tossing a twenty dollar bill on the table.

Sam nodded and followed his brother toward the door. "Green River, Arkansas."

**END**


End file.
